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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5529003" data-attributes="member: 18280">If I continually mentioned how giant spiders dominated the game, and you continually gave reasons why giant spiders did not, I could then saySomething that occurs to me about this entire conversation.  Every element that gets brought up focuses on one single game element - how to keep giant spiders from dominating the game.  This single thing influences so much of the game.but that would still not make it true.Yes, I could run a game dominated by giant spiders.  That would not mean that your game was dominated by giant spiders, even using the same ruleset.Um, no.Scrolls came up specifically because, being made of paper (or similar) they are fragile.  The same is also true of the party map, should the party be creating/carrying one.  It is a truly sucktacular moment for a group to be miles below ground in the Twisting Caverns of Doom when their map is burned to ashes.However, one has only to look at the TSR Modules of Yore to see that fighter gear was targetted by such things as Heat Metal conditions, strong magnetism, etc.  And let us not forget the humble rust monster.  The beginning of Module A4 is as hard on fighters as on casters....harder in some ways, because a few spell components (pinch of sand for Sleep, for example) are trivially easy to find.No, in early D&D, everyone is more-or-less targetted equally.Cool.....As long as you don't make the mistake of treating a limited resource as an unlimited resource.  Much of the strategic play in early D&D is about how and when you use your limited resources.....Something that is certainly "softened" in 3e, and largely removed (intentionally) from 4e.It's never come up in any game I have either run or played in.  This is, IMHO, similar to "Look how many reasons you have to come up with to keep giant spiders from dominating the game!  There's antivenom in the equipment list!"Pointing out how trivially easy it is to solve a problem should never be taken as proof that a problem is widespread.  Actually, it should be taken as evidence to the contrary, if anything.Hold on there, Tex.Random encounters occur for the specific reasons of (1) verisimilitude and (2) strategic resource management.  Spells are a strategic resource, but they are hardly the only one.Without (2), there is no reason not to throw everything you have at every encounter.  You do not need casters for this to be the case.  If a party consists entirely of fighters, and those fighters can rest enough to heal all damage between encounters, hit points cease to be of strategic importance, and are only of tactical importance within each given encounter.As soon as this happens, the GM needs to adjust encounters so that every encounter is designed to potentially use up the party's total strategic resources, lest every encounter otherwise become trivial.  This means that the fights have to last long enough to use those resources (leading to long, grindy combats) and that they have to be all roughly the same in terms of challenge (leading to long, boring, grindy combats).You might add some kind of easily defeated creature into the mix, to give the illusion of numerical superiority on one side without unbalancing the combat.  They might also allow you to control the pace of the combat a little, so as to make it less boring.  And you might design some powers specifically to counter these easily defeated creatures, to give the players an illusion that their characters are effective.(The reason this must be illusory is that the combat system, designed to use all resources without resulting in a TPK, must reduce swinginess, and must therefore occur over a greater time frame.  This greater time frame means that the cost, to the players rather than their characters, in time for any fight in which the characters can truly demonstrate effectiveness is greater than the gain, to the players, for that fight.  Thus fights where the characters are truly effective are largely tossed to the wayside.)If you are going to design commercial adventures for such a game, you need to know, therefore, what the party's strategic resources are likely to be to a very high degree of accuracy.  Let's call this the "party balance point".  This means you need to know how much wealth they have per level, and you need to remove anything that potentially "unbalances" the "party balance point".If, at the same time, you expect the PCs to level during an adventure, it then becomes critically important that the PCs face the encounters in a set order, so that they meet only those encounters that are balanced for the strategic resources at their level.  Otherwise, again, the game is no longer balanced around the "party balance point" and you end up with either a TPK or GM intervention to prevent the same.These last two factors lead to railroady adventure design, possibly along some kind of path or format that controls how the encounters are handled, possibly down to the starting position of each individual piece.Now, I'm not exactly sure what such a game would look like, but if that was the cost of resolving the warrior vs. wizard "problem" (which has never been a problem for me), it is a cost I am entirely unwilling to pay!  So, I will hold fast to my strategic resources, thank you!Now, this is true specifically because the design of the casters in TSR-D&D, from OD&D on, is designed around strategic resources.  But, as shown above, this is true for all classes if the strategic resource element is removed.  Certainly, evening out the casters and warriors can result in a game where everyone's resources feel more "balanced", but in practice this actually limits the kinds of "balance" a game can achieve to a rather narrow focus.Again, if you have no problem with giant spiders, modifying everything else to resolve that "problem" makes little sense, and can damage the things you do enjoy about the game.Which doesn't mean that a ruleset shouldn't be created to help folks who have problems with giant spiders......but it does mean that those folks shouldn't assume (A) that their problems are universal, or (B) that their solution is going to be universally applauded.Again, as described above, this is simply not true.If there was a game that had attempted this, with the predicted results of long grindy combats and micromanaged railroady commercial adventures, I would point it out as an example of the results of removing (or largely removing) strategic resource management.  Unfortunately, no such game exists at this time.You are right; I am presuming a game that deals in strategic resource management, such as Dungeons & Dragons (any TSR edition) or RCFG.  There is also, as you note, the fact that TSR-D&D scrolls are random and contain more than one spell.  If you have a scroll of Fireball and Invisibility, do you store it with your combat-ready scrolls, or with your better-protected utility scrolls?  That is the sort of strategic decision that makes play interesting, to me.  YMMV.Interestingly enough, this quote doesn't say“Top level magic-users dominate the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magic types until they have worked up.”It doesn't even say that they are the most powerful characters, it qualifies that they are perhaps the most powerful characters.That is, I agree, an interesting counterpoint to your argument.RC</blockquote>

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