Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9503789" data-attributes="member: 29398">Only when you look within the D&D-verse.3e, 4e, and 5e all took ideas from outside the D&D sphere and adopted/adapted them (or in some cases shoehorned them) into whatever version of D&D was being designed at the time.Contrast with 3.5e, Essentials, and 5.2e, all of which are simply direct riffs off the system already in place at the time.That "all over the place" resolution is IMO far preferable to everything being on a d20 as it allows for more flexibility in design.And the mechanics haven't been that "jumpy".  A fair bit of what became 3e was run out in late-era 2e splatbooks*, and a fair bit of what became 4e was run out in late-era 3.5 splatbooks*, thus a group using all the splats would see the edition transitions as being much smoother than would groups using only the initial core books.This follows TSR's lead: a lot of what would become 2e was run out in the late-era 1e splatbooks.5e went a different (we can argue all day about whether better worse or the same) route, with the run-out period being replaced by public playtesting...which, given how little of substance got changed by said playtesting, really was just a run-out period under a different name.* - and-or in adjacent games e.g. I believe one of the Star Wars RPGs contributed quite a bit to (4e?) design - memory's hazy on that one.4e was an unpopular edition in their eyes and so they papered over quite a bit of it.  But the underlying playstyle expectations - short fast campaigns, quick level-ups, easy on the PCs (compared to 3e and earlier), grid-and-mini based, treasure and opponents neatly parcelled out, realism thrown out the window - didn't change a whit.  And as my preferences tend toward none of those, from my viewpoint 4e and 5e look mighty similar.Once you've learned how to paint halfway well (which is the hard part) you're then able to make your paintings look like Leonardo's or look like those of a five-year-old.The minute you look at the math that closely you're already trying to hew far closer to perfection than IMO is necessary.Better to mostly ignore the math other than in generalities.  Fine-tuning it any further gives us 3e, with a stupid-steep power curve where both monsters and party needed to be within a very narrow level range to be viable threats to each other at the same time.  4e did kind of the same thing in a different way by giving everybody tons of hit points and thus making combats go on long enough that averages would take over.  5e tried expanding this idea to cover the adventuring day rather than a single combat.In the end it's on the DM to realize that if a monster does 20 points damage on an average hit (e.g. its damage roll is d10 + 15) then throwing those monsters at PCs who still each on average have only 13 hit points is very likely a TPK.  The designers' job is to present a wide enough range of monsters and other threats to viably challenge parties of any size, level, or composition and then let each DM decide what to do with said challenges and learn by trial and error.For three editions they've tried helping DMs by adding things like CRs or XP budgets etc. and - going by the coverage in these forums - for three editions it hasn't helped anyone very much.Balance can also mean each PC has an equal chance of getting knocked off.  Randomness is a very good balancing mechanism.Which raises another aspect not yet touched on: simplicity vs complexity.The more complex a design gets, the harder it is to make sure all the interactions work properly.  All three WotC editions have IMO been way too complex, largely due to their focus on the character-build side of things rather than character-play.Magic the Gathering is a fairly unbalanced system and yet its appeal has remained steady for 30+ years now, largely because most of the time there isn't just one "solution".  Every deck, no matter how well or poorly built, has strengths and weaknesses.Engineer, or artist?I think that may be where we're fundamentally disagreeing here: you seem to see RPG design as an engineering challenge where I see it as more of an art form.Thing is, in BX-1e it wasn't expected or assumed that PCs would advance to the point of being able to hard-cast Wish or any of those other crazy-powerful spells.  "Name level" (i.e. the point where the game kind of expected PCs to retire into non-adventuring activities) came at 9th; Wish doesn't come online until 18th.I've been playing 1e or 1e-adjacent games forever and I've never seen a 15th-level PC (though I hear one of the current 14ths might be getting close).  The highest I've ever played is 13th, the highest I've ever DMed is 12th; and yes the system does kinda fall apart beyond about 11th level unless the DM does a lot of kitbashing.Difficulty isn't supposed to be enjoyable.  It's supposed to be frustrating, annoying, and unpleasant - that's why it's difficult.And yes, occasional frustration IMO should be a design goal.  Nothing should ever work perfectly every time and some things should only work a small percentage of the time...but be spectacular when they do work.Side note: waving the hops at the brew from several feet away is all any beer needs IMO, says he who lives in the city where (arguably) the whole hops-uber-alles trend began.There should be challenges.  And with those challenges should come occasional "I win" buttons along with occasional "I lose" buttons.And yet, the most chaotic system of all - everything left to pure random chance - would also be in near-perfect balance other than in the very short term.A random assemblage is almost never an orderly structure - agreed.  My point is that provided all the pieces are present, a random assemblage is almost good enough as it sits and any but the most basic attempts to enforce order on it (e.g. shaking the box to settle the pieces) is highly likely to be wasted effort.Meh - that's the engineer's approach again.  Me, I'll just throw stuff at the wall and if it sticks, it's good. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Question: have you ever tried to design a game yourself, or done major root-level kitbashing to an existing game to the point where the result is almost a new game?I ask because I've done the latter, and it really ain't as hard as you're making it out to be.Heh - sounds like "challenge accepted" should I ever end up playing a Fighter in a 5e game. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'm a strong opponent of metagaming but hadn't ever thought of spotlight control/balance as being such.</blockquote>

Verification