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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tiornys" data-source="post: 4801274" data-attributes="member: 17633">tl/dr summary:  WotC should make things balanced because balance is hard.  Expertise isn't balanced, but the idea behind it is justified because that idea rebalances other problems.  If Expertise were errata, the problems that can arise if only some characters take it disappear.I find it pretty cool that you have a group where this kind of thing works out.  Problem is, you can't demonstrate that something is generally true (or that it is never true) with anecdotal evidence.  Anecdotal evidence can only demonstrate that something is sometimes true, or that something is sometimes false.Your experience supports a claim that it's ok for the math to be imbalanced because people can have fun with that.  Unfortunately, I have direct experience with players being dissatisfied because of imbalanced math.  I've also read numerous other anecdotal comments relating roughly the same thing.  So, I can definitely say that it is sometimes true that imbalanced math has a negative effect on the fun people have with D&D.Now, prior to releasing 4E, WotC gathered enough anecdotal evidence to convince them that having balanced math led to a better experience for more people than having imbalanced math.  Sales of 4E suggests that they were correct.  I'm not claiming that everyone has more fun with a better balanced system; you couldn't prove that to be generally true with anecdotal evidence if you wanted to, and in fact, I've seen cases where the higher level of balance leads to player dissatisfaction.  In my experience the ratio is around 4:1 in favor of balance.Now here's the thing.  It's easy to make things unbalanced.  Really easy.  I can think of over ten methods for doing so in the time it's taking me to type this sentence.  It's harder to spot things that are unbalanced.  It's a skillset that includes general game experience, knowledge of game design/development theory, knowledge of statistics, mathematical ability, analytical ability, creativity, lateral thinking, and intuition.  It's much, much harder to make things balanced; that skillset includes being able to spot things that are unbalanced, added to a host of tools for trying to rebalance them.So, what I want from WotC is the best balanced system they can give me, because I can use all the help I can get at making the system balanced.  Spotting imbalanced things, I can get help with.  Tons of help, just by browsing these message boards; doing this will alert me to most anything that is potentially imbalanced, and I can make my own decisions from there about what I think crosses the line.  Making things unbalanced, if I decide to do that, I need no help with.The expertise feats are unbalanced.  I spotted that one on my own.  But, they look like they're intended to rebalance a system that is unbalanced, which I wouldn't know without these boards.  The idea is good; the execution through feats is subpar.  Errata would be immensely superior, in part because it would decrease the potential gap in character hit-rate.  Right now, you can have some, but not all, of the characters in a group taking Expertise; if it were errata, either all of the characters would benefit, or none would.  Either way, DM's would be dealing with smaller potential gaps than the ones mentioned above.t~</blockquote>

Verification