Core classes. How are they balanced?

[Sylrae]

I got through about 3-4 posts on this thread before I couldn't go any farther.

"I know more than WotC on balance b/c I played a couple games and post on internez forums! They may make articles with guides on strainge/obscure spells and other things but no way they included them in their hundreds of hours of playtesting!"

The... arcane... spells... are... stronger. That is all.

Nice, nathreet. 3 points for trolling.

Clearly wizards only balanced the game for one particular playstyle, instead of balancing the game in a way where a number of playstyles work. The wizards balance assumes a fighter/paladin/barbarian/(lesser extent - ranger/monk), rogue, wizard/sorcerer/druid, cleric/druid. It also assumes the cleric will choose to be primarily a healer, even though the cleric has many other non-healing builds which would be more appealing to many players. It assumes players won't do any optimizing.

That's alot of assumptions.
1. Number of players: some groups have less than 4, I've played in a number with more than four. its the less that can cause issues occasionally.
2. Build diversity: not all groups will choose that build. sometimes there are no fighters, or no rogues, or no wizards, or no clerics. which is why less than 4 can fuzzle up the default system.
3. Healer Cleric: just because a cleric can heal doesn't mean he's gonna stop kicking ass to do it. They may rush into combat like a fighter and be too far from the party, or they may have used all their spells on buffs and attack spells..
4. Players will optimize if they can. that means the druid will put his highest points in his 2 most necessary stats, and then use druid abilities to make the other stats irrelevent if he can. It's like whats wrong with 3.5e polymorph, except that they can cast spells while they do it. (In some cases not being able to cast spells makes no sense, like a mage who polymorphs into a drow - but thats just a logic thing.)
5. Most importantly, assuming a playstyle when balancing leads to these sorts of imbalances. what about an evil campaign for instance. or a campaign like mine, where the players work together but are also autonomous, and don't HAVE to work together.

Saying: "you can only play like this!" is what you imply with your statement, and that doesn't work very well in a roleplaying game. If we wanted that we would go play risk, or dragon strike, or warhammer.

So do I think 'amateurs' can do it better than wizards? Yes.

Do I think you could do any real design? No, because you can't even present an argument in a logical fashion, and so resort to trolling.

Why? because we (some of us) know not all games are stereotypical repetetive dungeon crawls with generic spread parties and perfectly synchronized players - even in the d20 system, and we (some of us, again) know or understand that not everyone would WANT their game to be that. It's like object oriented programming. You program for the general case, providing for all the options that COULD be necessary, even if you don't end up actually using all of them. this way, if you need to further expand, or use something differently, you don't have to start all over again

If i wanted the generic play style it wouldn't be as big of an issue, but that gets boring for me after a single dungeoncrawl. which is the reason that reevaluating the balance inconsistencies (which don't come up as often in that generic playstyle) is an issue that deserves my attention.

If you're going to try to argue someone is wrong ifnstead of being useful, provide actual arguments, instead of just trolling and making yourself look like an idiot.

 

[Sylrae]

<Edit:> Whoops, Doublepost.

 

[Tomcat1066]

Is it possible that they appear unbalanced in your game not because of the rules, but the players? Some people play clerics well and wizards poorly, or vice versa. As such, the problems may be partially because of players and play styles.

As for balance, it's not balanced. Balanced is for my 20th level fighter to be the match for a 20th level wizard. Ain't gonna happen. I think the big issue is the style of game you run makes this much more obvious. I think the wizards and be spiffed up a bit, and I'm working on something like this:

-spontaneous casting like sorcerers.
-Sorcerer's known spell table.
-Wizards spells cast per day table.

It beefs up the wizard a bit. Of course, in my incarnation, I'm also nerfing them a bit as well, but that's a personal thing. My style of DMing is far different from the original poster's so I suspect my nerfing efforts won't benefit him

 

[Sylrae]

Is it possible that they appear unbalanced in your game not because of the rules, but the players? Some people play clerics well and wizards poorly, or vice versa. As such, the problems may be partially because of players and play styles.

As for balance, it's not balanced. Balanced is for my 20th level fighter to be the match for a 20th level wizard. Ain't gonna happen. I think the big issue is the style of game you run makes this much more obvious. I think the wizards and be spiffed up a bit, and I'm working on something like this:

-spontaneous casting like sorcerers.
-Sorcerer's known spell table.
-Wizards spells cast per day table.

It beefs up the wizard a bit. Of course, in my incarnation, I'm also nerfing them a bit as well, but that's a personal thing. My style of DMing is far different from the original poster's so I suspect my nerfing efforts won't benefit him

that depends on the nature of the nerfing.

and balancing them at 20 doesn't solve anything, its the whole table that matters. making them equal power at 20 makes wizards worse, because that means they start out WAY weaker than fighters and finish at the same power level. If you want to follow a level per level balance system, you need to balance each class against each other class at each level, so they are the same power level. this is more difficult than balancing a class as a whole so at various points they may be less or more powerful, but it evens out. And what makes it more difficult is that you need to consider non-combat effectiveness as well. How are they at skill based challenges? How are they in a social setting? A fighter is good at combat, but if he has to talk himself out of execution, he is going to have a hard time (with most fighter builds). He also can't disable traps, or what not. If you play without class skills, he still doesn't have many points to work with, and will be good at a much smaller number of things.

 

[Tomcat1066]

I wasn't talking about balancing them at 20th level at all. My suggestion was to basically let wizards take the gloves off by allowing them to cast the same number of spells, but to cast whatever they know as often as they want within their per-day limits. Yes, they will still suck at lower levels, but as they gain in levels, their ability to stomp on clerics should increase significantly as well.

I was trying to answer your question, not get into a discussion of skills or anything like that.

 

[Sylrae]

I wasn't talking about balancing them at 20th level at all. My suggestion was to basically let wizards take the gloves off by allowing them to cast the same number of spells, but to cast whatever they know as often as they want within their per-day limits. Yes, they will still suck at lower levels, but as they gain in levels, their ability to stomp on clerics should increase significantly as well.

I was trying to answer your question, not get into a discussion of skills or anything like that.

while your idea is a great way to make the wizard more at cleric level, and maybe even a bit past it, I think a better solution is to de-power the cleric, or youre widening the gap between the fighter and the casters.

 

[Tomcat1066]

How about nerfing everyone down with an attack role for direct attack spells then. I give spell casters a base magical attack bonus of +1 per level. Give it to all spell casters and it should tone down the nasty somewhat. After all, they could miss.

Granted, it won't do a whole lot due to area affect spells, but you could always throw that as an attack roll as well.