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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nifft" data-source="post: 5142934" data-attributes="member: 6562">Shall I compare game balance to a summer's day?It is stickier, and more prone to death by mosquito.So, when last we left our intrepid adventurers, we were going on about how this "balance" thing had all sorts of repercussions... but like the poor, balance has always been with us, invisibly doing a lot of heavy lifting and then getting lynched for looking at flavor's girlfriend wrong.I propose we examine what this "balance" thing has meant over the years. It seems to me that some kind of "balance" has been one of D&D's guiding principles forever, but the specific brand of "balance" has changed considerably in each edition.Note: it turns out I'm no expert on early editions, so please feel free to jump in and correct me when I'm off base. (Many of my memories of early editions have been replaced by sound clips of Minsc and Boo.) Thanks in advance.- - -[h2]Ye Olde Edition Balance[/h2]"Amortized Pwnage" - The idea here is that all PCs receive a similar amount of ZOMG PWN moments, but only if you count them over the scope of a whole campaign from levels 1 - 10 (or whatever your "name level" was). At low levels, fighter-types got lots of ZOMG PWN moments every session, while caster-types had time to feed their pet Tamagotchi(tm). However, once per day, even a caster type got to pull out his ZOMG PWN stick and cast a game-changer like sleep.At higher levels, the casters could claim most of the ZOMG PWN moments, but fighter-types still had some magic-resistant niche opponents (like golems, drow, and nilbogs). (Note the word "niche" here. It'll be back later.)Another form of balance, which would stick with D&D up until 3.5e, is the idea of balance via in-game choice restrictions, particularly restrictions on conduct. Paladins are the central class member here, but even Rangers and Druids had restrictions on their roleplay options IIRC. I'm going to call this "Balance by DM Fiat", because alignment and code-of-conduct have been such hot button issues that you're not likely to get a better answer than "talk to your DM".I'm also going to lump most of the balancing restrictions on spellcasters into this DM Fiat category, since many DMs seem to have deigned to ignore them entirely. 3.0/3.5e were an interesting blend of fiat and non-fiat restrictions: some stayed, some went away, and the ones that stayed were subject to frequent "fixes". 4e has moved away from this mechanic entirely, except where it hasn't."Balance by Retardation" - This deserves its own category, since it reared its ugly head in 3e as well. The idea was that if your class was more awesome, that was balanced by your PC rising in level more slowly. The assumption here is that you always want to be higher level, but it's a flawed assumption, because a 7th level Thief wasn't better at stabbing than a 5th level Fighter, IIRC. This idea of balance led to parties of PCs with mixed character levels, which was normally okay, except when they were hit by effects that cared about level. Then suddenly the Thief is the only guy standing, while everyone who was under 6th level is dead forever thanks to a death spell, and it takes me forever to carry off and sell all their gear."Balance by You Didn't Say You Looked Up" - The final kind of game balance, which might more charitably be called "Balance by Puzzle", was that there were plenty of situations which would kill your PC no matter what you had in terms of level, stats, magic items, or anything else on your character sheet. You have 18 Str / 18 Dex / 18 Con, and you stick your hand in the stone mouth? Great, now your PC has no hand. This is "balance" in that all character choices are equally useless: it is the player being tested, not the character.Mazes may fall into that latter category. In retrospect, holy crap was it not fun to have to map stuff as a player. But I was young, and time was cheap back then.Actually, I lied. The final kind of balance was "Balance by Randomly Screw You". This included random encounters, which penalized classes that needed regular rest, but also things like System Shock for transmutation magic, and spells like reincarnation.- - -[h2]Enter 3e[/h2] It seemed like Balance by Retardation was on the chopping block, but it came back rather quickly in the form of Level Adjustment, and was formalized over the course of development of 3.5e. With "LA Buyoff" in Unearthed Arcana, the rules once more supported a party where, even if each member had the same # of XP, they could be of significantly different ECL.3e also seemed to be doing away with Balance by DM Fiat -- especially for spellcasters. (Paladins remained screwed.) Removing the DM Fiat rules for spellcasters, though, opened them up to myriad abuses*. For example, in early editions, spell preparation time was considerable, and increased exponentially along side exponentially increasing spell slots -- inducing vulnerability to "randomly screw you"-style balance, and occasionally time pressure. Another capricious re-balancing: System Shock fell by the wayside in this edition, but Druids kept their "randomly screw you" lookup table for reincarnation.It seems to me that 3e also instituted (in a formal sense) "Balance by Niche", by which I mean there were certain situations that demanded a Rogue (like a trap with a DC over 20), and others which strongly indicated the Rogue's player ought to invest in a GameBoy(tm) (like a dungeon full of Constructs, Plants, Oozes, and Undead).- - -And now I'm tired. I'll be back tomorrow with my thoughts on 3e vs. 4e conceptions of balance.Cheers, -- N*) alternately: "... opened them up to a plethora of abuses".</blockquote>

Verification