Forked Thread: Why do we have a constant numbers bloat?

[ExploderWizard]

Not really seeing an increase in numbers in BECMI and 2e, save relative to OD&D.

For BECMI I was referring to OD&D. 2E saw the effects largely on the monster end of things. AD&D monsters were for the most part weak vs a party with high stats and lots of magic items. Check out Dragon magazine's tale of Lord Arrago vs an ancient red dragon.

2E PC's were much like 1E but giants, dragons, and some other monsters got a huge power boost. I think the monster design for 2E was influenced by the higher stat averages of most characters at the time. This is just speculation on my part. Any 2E development insiders around?

 

[Gentlegamer]

If your DM made you choose a class before you rolled for stats and you ended up with a 6 strength fighter, well...tough luck. Of course you were supposed to die easily. That's the way life works, it isn't fair. It wasn't very much fun to die so easily and to be completely unable to hit anything. But, maybe if you got really lucky, you'd survive and you'd have a story to tell.

In AD&D 1e, a player creating a human fighter could choose to roll 9d6 and use the best three die results.

 

[Obryn]

In AD&D 1e, a player creating a human fighter could choose to roll 9d6 and use the best three die results.

AAAH!!

Method V from Unearthed Arcana hurts my eyes!

If we assume Method I from the DMG was the baseline means of generating ability scores, it was 4d6, drop low, arrange to taste.

And, Majoru, I don't know of any but fringe DMs who made anyone pick their class before rolling for scores - unless they were using the aforementioned ocular-damaging Method V. I mean, you'd be especially SOL if you wanted a Paladin!

-O

 

[Mallus]

In a similar vein, contrast this with Book of Nine Swords. IMHO, the "right" thing to do to come up with fighter that compares with CoDzilla is to rein in CoDzilla so it compares to the rest of the classes. But how well would people take a supplement that TAKES POWERS AWAY. Generally, not well.

It does kinda make sense that "taking powers away" would be seen as a Bad Thing in a game that has it's roots --not to mention trunk and branches-- in adolescent --not that that's a bad thing-- power fantasies.

Traditionally, it's a game where you play a tank (or Howitzer) that spends it's free time and money on ale and whores.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

For BECMI I was referring to OD&D. 2E saw the effects largely on the monster end of things. AD&D monsters were for the most part weak vs a party with high stats and lots of magic items. Check out Dragon magazine's tale of Lord Arrago vs an ancient red dragon.

2E PC's were much like 1E but giants, dragons, and some other monsters got a huge power boost. I think the monster design for 2E was influenced by the higher stat averages of most characters at the time. This is just speculation on my part. Any 2E development insiders around?

Ah, good point. I forgot about the major upgrades to monsters in 2e.

(The official reason for this, especially where giants were concerned, was to provide more high-level enemies to replace the initially cut demons and devils. IIRC, though, when the renamed demons and devils returned in short order, they were further increased in power.)

BECMI stats seem to have just been in keeping with late-OD&D/AD&D standards, if not a little lower.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The modern theory of gaming is more about balance. The only way to do that is to give you a lot less randomness in character creation. Preferably none. But if there is no randomness, then "the max" will become the average. I say "the max" because there may be a practical limit. If it costs 10 points for a 17 and 20 points for an 18, most people won't spend the extra.

Thats a funny observation. In OD&D (and Basic) a 17 STR fighter was pretty darn good. In AD&D any human fighter with less than 18** was a 2nd class citizen, same for 2E. In 3E a 17 was pretty good........for a start, same in 4E.

I guess it is the random that I miss. I like point buy RPG's, I enjoy creating a GURPS character. One aspect of D&D that made it special was the randomness. Playing a memorable (even if short-lived) character with low stats was just as much fun as thrill of rolling all high stats sometimes. The feeling of bloat comes from the fact that back in the day, having low stats could shorten a character's life and now not having exceptionally high stats will do the same thing.

 

[Remathilis]

If your DM made you choose a class before you rolled for stats and you ended up with a 6 strength fighter, well...tough luck. Of course you were supposed to die easily. That's the way life works, it isn't fair. It wasn't very much fun to die so easily and to be completely unable to hit anything. But, maybe if you got really lucky, you'd survive and you'd have a story to tell.

The modern theory of gaming is more about balance. The only way to do that is to give you a lot less randomness in character creation. Preferably none. But if there is no randomness, then "the max" will become the average. I say "the max" because there may be a practical limit. If it costs 10 points for a 17 and 20 points for an 18, most people won't spend the extra.

I suspect this has more to do with the evolving concept of character creation rather than generation.People coming to the table expecting to play something particular; a wizard, an elf, a paladin, etc. While it is certainly viable for a bunch of people to get together, role some random dice and generate something resembling a character and play him until he's ground into dust (and do it all again), I suspect most players began to vie away from a "random" PC and more toward "a character I want to play" and D&D's char-gen has moves slowly away from "roll 3d6 in order" to "assign 22 points based on this table" to accommodate most player's desire to play a specific type of character and give him reasonable chance of survival.

In other words, people started wanting to play the character they wanted to as their first PCs, not randomly create him 1d4+1 deaths into the game.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

In a similar vein, contrast this with Book of Nine Swords. IMHO, the "right" thing to do to come up with fighter that compares with CoDzilla is to rein in CoDzilla so it compares to the rest of the classes. But how well would people take a supplement that TAKES POWERS AWAY. Generally, not well.

Why is the "right" thing to do to reduce the powers of certain classes rather than increasing others?

There's actually an obvious, practical reason for doing things the way WotC tried to in late 3e:

If you introduce a supplement that takes away powers from, say, the cleric and druid, that supplement MUST be purchased or at least used by every player in the group to restore balance. It becomes a compulsory purchase for the GM and a very strong recommend for every player who considers playing one of those classes, as they would otherwise have to borrow the book. Every 3rd party supplement dealing with clerics and druids becomes instantly obsolete, as do any that tried to correct the imbalance in the way Bo9S (and PHB2) did. Every 1st party supplement requires either errata in the nerfing book or elsewhere, or becomes obsolete.

On the other hand, if you introduce new options to upgrade the lagging classes and archetypes, then you can keep ALL the old material, and only someone who actively wants to use the new material needs to purchase and use it.

(Not that Bo9S actually DID allow fighter types to match up with CoDzilla, but nothing short of making them mythic rather than fantasy heroes would have. )

 

[Mallus]

(Not that Bo9S actually DID allow fighter types to match up with CoDzilla, but nothing short of making them mythic rather than fantasy heroes would have. )

Right. Bo9S gave martial classes more options, it didn't give them the power of full-progression spellcasters.

 

[Lacyon]

Thats a funny observation. In OD&D (and Basic) a 17 STR fighter was pretty darn good. In AD&D any human fighter with less than 18** was a 2nd class citizen, same for 2E. In 3E a 17 was pretty good........for a start, same in 4E.

I guess it is the random that I miss. I like point buy RPG's, I enjoy creating a GURPS character. One aspect of D&D that made it special was the randomness. Playing a memorable (even if short-lived) character with low stats was just as much fun as thrill of rolling all high stats sometimes. The feeling of bloat comes from the fact that back in the day, having low stats could shorten a character's life and now not having exceptionally high stats will do the same thing.

There was an interesting mechanism in one of the dragon magazines a while back for using Three Dragon Ante cards to randomly distribute points among your stats for point-buy. It frequently ended up with bland distributions, but I did some house-ruling on it (for starters, allowing the player to distribute some of the points rather than having everything be determined by the cards). I think with some tweaks it could be pretty good, but most of the time it's more involved than I want.