D&D 5E How much should 5e aim at balance?

[pemerton]

I don't think it's possible to punish optimization. It's pretty much a contradiction in terms. If something gets you negative results, then it's clearly not optimal and something else is, and that will be chosen instead.

But it is possible to have mechanics that tend to dissuade specialisaion and encourage diversification in PC build, for example - whereas, in practice, a lot of optimisation in a game like 3E or 4e is based around specialisation.

Or to have mechanics which offer few and constrained places for player choice about build. (RuneQuest and Classic Traveller are examples of this.)

I'm not advocating for those mechanics - especially not for D&D, which historically, and especially since 3E, has taken a different approach - but they do exist.

 

[billd91]

Choosing Grease over Magic Missile is exploiting the rules? Choosing Color Spray over Burning Hands is exploiting the rules? Really?

Choosing to actually USE the feats that your wizard starts with and crafting scrolls to carry all your utility spells is exploiting the rules? Never mind using the bonus feats that come bundled with your class.

How? How is using basic game elements, where there is absolutely no advice given as to which is a more "appropriate" choice possibly exploiting the rules?

We're not talking about Pun Pun here. That's obviously not a real problem. Nor are we talking about Bag of Rats either. These are taking rules and beating them with the lawyer stick. No. This is looking at the choices that are freely available and having the werewithal to realize that there is a serious, serious power gap between them.

Unless you advocate fighters using sporks, your argument falls apart. Is a fighter in full plate using a two handed sword and power attack exploiting the rules? He's jacked up his damage. He's more effective. And he's even more effective because the cleric has dropped a few buffs his way. Is he exploiting the rules? Of course not.

So, how is taking Rope Trick to give the party a safe place to rest exploiting the rules?

Deliberately being obtuse isn't a very helpful discussion style. Making smart, not-overtly metagame, in character choices isn't the problem. The problem is redlining the system all the time. The problem is deciding that a character is only effective when he's maxed his spellcasting stat and focused on save or sit spells, meanwhile dumping as many other stats as he can get away with because they don't contribute to winning the game (because what does an interesting story matter anyway). Add into that dumping or selling any interesting or unique magic item to get the Big 6 because they contribute all the time.

And yes, it is about recognizing there are differences in power when everything is taken together and exploiting them, pursuing the numbers that bring that power, rather than the alternative of adding texture to your character.

All of that takes a particular psychological approach to RPGs and the rules that they use - that they aren't there just as guidelines to provide a bit of order to the chaos of playing a character. That the rules are there to exploit to enable you to win the game. That's an alien psychology to a lot of people who play, who don't care about having a fighter with a 20 Strength at 1st level, who are willing to invest a skill point per level in Craft: food because they think the idea of being a half-ogre barbarian fry cook is fun, who would rather be a halfling rogue fighting with a small dagger because that's the character they envision and want to play even if they'll be an average of 1 less point of damage per hit compared to a short sword (which they can also use) and a whole lot further behind a medium sized character with the same strength but wielding a long sword, and who can look at the mechanical incentives to playing a certain way and turn their back on them because that's not the style of game they want to play, nor is it necessary to play that way to be successful.

So yes, it is a different psychology. And it's one that doesn't mix well with the psychology that doesn't really care to exploit the rules. But my point in response to Mustrum Ridcully was that you don't have to play 3e like AD&D for it to not break. You can play it like it is, like 3e, without it breaking because there's another component necessary for it to "break" and that's playing with the redlining the rules psychology. 3e won't break because grease is better than magic missile in many circumstances, nor because color spray is better than burning hands in many other circumstances. It won't break because giants are more susceptible to will-save based spells than fortitude-based spells or because their ranged attacks suck compared to their hand to hand attacks.

I think pemerton has a point about point-buy systems tending to be up front with advice (they really do use advice rather than mechanisms) to keep PCs under control and under GM supervision with character generation. 3e, being the D&D edition most responsive to player choices when it comes to build options, could use a bit more of that (and I'm not alone in believing that, hence Monte Cook's "Ivory Tower" article).

 

[Magil]

Where I, for one, would like to see the system designed to punish that style of play harshly enough that it would mostly just go away; as it inevitably wrecks the game for the rest of us. In any edition.
My guess is they're trying to appeal to those whose end goal is to play the game rather than break it.

You know, someone who practices character optimization (a CharOper if you will) doesn't sit down and say "well, let's see how I can break the game today!" The aim is to have fun by creating and playing a powerful character. I don't see how this "wrecks the game" for the rest of you? Do you feel inadequate or something?

I do often create my characters with a mindset of "Well I'm going to pick generally what I feel are the best mechanical options for the concept I want to play, and then I'm going to make a 'character' that suits those choices." Why does this ruin the game for other people? I don't understand.

I think it'd be foolish for WotC to intentionally or unintentionally alienate people that play like this. Note that I don't think they're going to, but it sounds like some people want them to?

Sure it is. You just make it laborious enough to do that it's a waste of time.

That's tricky, because what is a "waste of time" for one person is "a worthy challenge" for another. It also seems to me to be pretty much guaranteed to backfire, no matter how you went about it.

If you make character optimization not pay off, however, then you have an impossibly generic system, because your choices don't matter at all. The system would have to be "perfectly balanced."

 

[billd91]

You know, someone who practices character optimization (a CharOper if you will) doesn't sit down and say "well, let's see how I can break the game today!" The aim is to have fun by creating and playing a powerful character. I don't see how this "wrecks the game" for the rest of you? Do you feel inadequate or something?

I don't feel inadequate at all. I feel I can be pretty successful without having to eke out the numbers.

I do often create my characters with a mindset of "Well I'm going to pick generally what I feel are the best mechanical options for the concept I want to play, and then I'm going to make a 'character' that suits those choices." Why does this ruin the game for other people? I don't understand.

And if you're playing at a table where everyone else (including the DM!) is playing the same way, it shouldn't cause too many problems. But what if you're part of a party of 4 and the other 3 aren't playing with the same style? There may be problems. And as the odd man out, you'd be the one most in need of changing your style.

I think it'd be foolish for WotC to intentionally or unintentionally alienate people that play like this. Note that I don't think they're going to, but it sounds like some people want them to?

I'd prefer it if they didn't have to design the game defensively toward that play style - nerfing certain options because they could be otherwise leveraged too much. My impression of 4e's design suggests a lot of defensive design and that alienated (unintentionally, I presume) me. I much prefer that sort of thing to be done on a per table/group basis with the rules offering insight into relatively powerful options.

 

[Magil]

And if you're playing at a table where everyone else (including the DM!) is playing the same way, it shouldn't cause too many problems. But what if you're part of a party of 4 and the other 3 aren't playing with the same style? There may be problems. And as the odd man out, you'd be the one most in need of changing your style.

This hypothetical situation seems largely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. We're talking about the design of the system in general, not any specific gaming table.

I'd prefer it if they didn't have to design the game defensively toward that play style - nerfing certain options because they could be otherwise leveraged too much. My impression of 4e's design suggests a lot of defensive design and that alienated (unintentionally, I presume) me. I much prefer that sort of thing to be done on a per table/group basis with the rules offering insight into relatively powerful options.

As I said, I understand if some things slip through the cracks. The system will never be perfect. If we can get something close to 4th edition's level of balance with about as many, I'm likely to be satisfied. I don't think that things such as diversity need to be sacrificed for balance. Just make sure it's done well, that's all I'm asking here. Everyone should have some "interesting choices" to make.

I don't like the idea of pushing the burden of balancing the system onto the DM, though. I feel like DMs already have enough to do. That's one of the reasons I will certainly never DM a game of 3rd edition or, if it remains like its current incarnation, DnD Next, but am happily DMing a game of 4th edition.

 

[Lanefan]

This hypothetical situation seems largely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. We're talking about the design of the system in general, not any specific gaming table.

Same point applies on a larger scale, though - does the game really have to be designed to rein in the one table in 10 that's going to go out of their way to break it?

I don't like the idea of pushing the burden of balancing the system onto the DM, though. I feel like DMs already have enough to do. That's one of the reasons I will certainly never DM a game of 3rd edition or, if it remains like its current incarnation, DnD Next, but am happily DMing a game of 4th edition.

I find this interesting: as a self-admitted optimizer you choose to run the edition that is least suited to optimization. Is this because your players won't rein themselves in?

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

If you make character optimization not pay off, however, then you have an impossibly generic system, because your choices don't matter at all.

I generally agree with your posts around this issue, but not with this particular point. Choices can matter although they have no implication for mechanical effectivenss: they can matter because of the change they make to the shared fiction. A game like HeroWars/Quest relies heavily upon this dimension of meaningfulness. A game like Burning Wheel or 4e relies upon it less, but still relies upon it to an extent: because 4e, for example, assumes that the GM is adapting encounter difficulty to reflect the level and general prowess of the PCs, to some extent optimising has no effect on relative effectiveness. The reward for having a tougher PC is a "story" reward - the fictional stakes are higher (eg you're fighting Orcus) - rather than a mecanical reward - the combats are still just as mecahnically challenging, because the GM has stepped them up.

A player might also get a degree of pleasure from the absolute effectiveness of his/her PC (eg my 20th level PC can solo Orcus!) but if that's the sole or even principal pleasure you're getting from an RPG, my feeling is you're missing out.

There is a contrast here with a game like, say, classic D&D, where improved absolute effectiveness is expected to also produce a degree of improved relative effectiveness. D&Dnext seems to be going back this way, too, with bounded accuracy.

I think this change away from the 4e approach to scaling and setting encounter difficulties may make it easier to break the game via optimisation.

Making smart, not-overtly metagame, in character choices isn't the problem.

But for some 3E players, clearly it is. They make smart, not overtly metagame choices in building clerics (nothing metagame about taking Craft Wands and making WCLW), or druids (nothing metagame about befriending a bear, summoning a bear and turning into a bear), or wizards (nothing metagame about studying and memorising strong spells like Colour Spray or Glitterdust or Evard's Black Tentacles). And the game breaks as a result.

Add into that dumping or selling any interesting or unique magic item to get the Big 6 because they contribute all the time.

Again, that's not obviously metagame. It can be a smart, ingame choice for your PC.

And if you're playing at a table where everyone else (including the DM!) is playing the same way, it shouldn't cause too many problems.

My impression is that many complaints about 3E are that, in fact, when everyone is playing this way it does cause problems, because of imbalances of mechanical effectivenss across the classes.

3e won't break because grease is better than magic missile in many circumstances, nor because color spray is better than burning hands in many other circumstances. It won't break because giants are more susceptible to will-save based spells than fortitude-based spells or because their ranged attacks suck compared to their hand to hand attacks.

Again, as an outsider to 3E play, my experience is that, for some, these mechanical features on their own are sufficient to break the game - in the examples you give, for example, the superiority of Grease or Glitterdust means that wizards dominate over fighters against golems, and against giants - both categories of opponent that historically are meant to favour fighters over wizards.

All of that takes a particular psychological approach to RPGs and the rules that they use

<snip>

That's an alien psychology to a lot of people who play, who don't care about having a fighter with a 20 Strength at 1st level, who are willing to invest a skill point per level in Craft: food because they think the idea of being a half-ogre barbarian fry cook is fun, who would rather be a halfling rogue fighting with a small dagger because that's the character they envision and want to play even if they'll be an average of 1 less point of damage per hit compared to a short sword (which they can also use) and a whole lot further behind a medium sized character with the same strength but wielding a long sword, and who can look at the mechanical incentives to playing a certain way and turn their back on them because that's not the style of game they want to play, nor is it necessary to play that way to be successful.

The person you describe here is clearly metagaming. I'm not saying that as a criticism. But as an observation, it seems undeniable. The person is certainly not playing their PC when they choose to be a dagger-wielding halfling or a half-ogre fry cook. They're making a metagame choice about the persona they want to adopt.

The person who focuses on pushing the mechanics hard is not metagaming to any greater extent. They have a different metagame priority.

I'd prefer it if they didn't have to design the game defensively toward that play style - nerfing certain options because they could be otherwise leveraged too much. My impression of 4e's design suggests a lot of defensive design and that alienated (unintentionally, I presume) me. I much prefer that sort of thing to be done on a per table/group basis with the rules offering insight into relatively powerful options.

I don't think that's a fair diagnosis of 4e. It is not designed defensively towards a "push the mechanics hard" style. It is designed to welcome and support a "push the mechanics hard" style. 4e's design utterly takes for granted that the shared fiction will be shaped by the mutual application of the mechanics by all at the table, without holding back.

It has no aspirations to free-forming as an ideal. That is quite different from (at least some approaches) to classic D&D, 2nd ed AD&D and (also, perhaps) 3E.

I think pemerton has a point about point-buy systems tending to be up front with advice (they really do use advice rather than mechanisms) to keep PCs under control and under GM supervision with character generation. 3e, being the D&D edition most responsive to player choices when it comes to build options, could use a bit more of that

Here are some interesting comments by Ron Edwards on design, and being upfront about it (from here and here).

Character generation text and methods are extremely diverse within each GNS mode, which is one of the reasons I favor group communication during this phase of pre-play. For instance, some Gamist-ish games utilize point-allocation systems, which looks similar to the widespread method in Simulationist-ish games. However, for Gamist purposes, this method is all about strategizing tradeoffs, rather than establishing a fixed internal-cause to "justify" the character. Similarly, Gamist character creation utilizing Fortune methods isn't the same as the few Simulationist randomized methods - in the former, it's a lot like gambling, whereas in the latter, it's about a character maturing through Fortune's vagaries represented by in-game effects like culture, weather, disease, and so forth (e.g. Harnmaster). . .

As far as I can tell, Simulationist game design runs into a lot of potential trouble when it includes secondary hybridization with the other modes of play. Gamist or Narrativist features as supportive elements introduce the thin end of the metagame-agenda wedge. The usual result is to defend against the "creeping Gamism" with rules-bloat, or to encourage negatively-extreme deception or authority in the GM in order to preserve an intended set of plot events, which is to say, railroading. In other words, a baseline Simulationist focus is easily subverted, leading to incoherence. . .

Another common problem is rules-bloat, which usually creeps into Simulationist game text as a form of anti-Gamist defense. I suggest that adding more layers to character creation is a poor idea, as it only introduces more potential points of broken Currency. . .

My recommendation is to know and value the virtues of Simulationist play . . . and to drive toward them with gusto. Don't spin your wheels defending your design against some other form of play.


Powergaming

This technique is all about ramping a system's Currency, Effectiveness, and reward system into an exponential spiral. As a behavior, it can be applied to any system, but most forms of D&D offer an excellent inroad for it . . .

Powergaming doesn't necessarily destroy the enjoyment of play . . However, it's fair to say that Powergaming is only functional if everyone is committed to it, and it carries dangers of leading to Breaking (see below).

To prevent Powergaming, many game designers identify the GM as the ultimate and final rules-interpreter. It's no solution at all, though: (1) there's no way to enforce the enforcement, and (2), even if the group does buy into the "GM is always right" decree, the GM is now empowered to Powergame over everyone else. . .

Breaking the game is defined as rendering others' ability to play ineffective in terms of any metric that happens to be important in that group. Theoretically, any and all games are breakable: one can always sweep the pieces off the board. But I'm talking about doing so in the context of identifying internal inconsistencies or vulnerable points in the design, breaking the game by playing it and rendering the Exploration nonsensical.

Here's the key giveaway in terms of system design: it is Broken (i.e. Breaking consistently works) if repetitive, unchanging behavior garners benefit. The player hits no self-correcting parameters and is never forced to readjust his or her strategy. . .

Breaking the Game isn't quite the same thing as Powergaming, because once a game is Broken, the group rarely continues to play. However, the latter often leads to the former, because Powergaming reveals vulnerable points in game design that are then Broken. Trying to prevent this one-two combination of behavior has led many game designers mistakenly to provide endless patch rules, full of exceptions to cover the exceptions, none of which accomplishes anything except to open up even more points of vulnerability.​

The challenge for D&D design is that it is trying to be all things to all people (or, at least, it wants to avoid a tight design focus). At least to date, D&Dnext seems to be looking to the "GM as arbiter" rather than rules bloat as the "solution". It will be interesting to see how that works out!

 

[Bluenose]

I'd prefer it if they didn't have to design the game defensively toward that play style - nerfing certain options because they could be otherwise leveraged too much.

You've made it very plain that you create characters (and expect others to create characters) for story reasons. Whether something is powerful or weak does not matter to you. So "nerfing certain options" doesn't seem like something that you would care about.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Deliberately being obtuse isn't a very helpful discussion style. Making smart, not-overtly metagame, in character choices isn't the problem. The problem is redlining the system all the time. The problem is deciding that a character is only effective when he's maxed his spellcasting stat and focused on save or sit spells, meanwhile dumping as many other stats as he can get away with because they don't contribute to winning the game (because what does an interesting story matter anyway). Add into that dumping or selling any interesting or unique magic item to get the Big 6 because they contribute all the time.

And here's where we have a deep disagreement about both the power differential of 3.X and what is needed to optimise. To be able to blow most challenges out of the water as a 3.X wizard you need three things:

1. Not to multiclass out of casting classes/prestige classes
2. A high (not outstanding) primary stat - say 14 at 1st level and then putting my bonus points into it - more is just gilding the lilly
3. A decent spell selection.

Points 1 and 2 should both be the default. I don't normally think up the character concept of "a stupid wizard" or "a foolish cleric" and the game should certainly not expect me to. And with Gygaxo-Vancian casters, spell selection is an in character choice - which means that to make a poor spell selection I need to find an in character reason to do so. And with clerics, wizards, or druids (or indeed the rest of Tier 1 like artificers) I have a decent mental stat. So I have no meta-excuse for picking poor spells.

I don't need to redline the system. Being a druid who turns into a bear and bringing a pet bear to the party is enough. As is being a specialist conjurer. All core options.



The issue is not that out of character I want to win the game. It's that in character I want to stay alive and to complete the quest. Trying to survive and complete your in character goals in character is indistinguishable from trying to win out of character. You are quite literally telling me that in order to play a caster in 3.X my character concept needs to be one that doesn't care if he or she succeeds or even if he or she dies. You want to restrict me to concepts that are trying to commit suicide-by-dungeon.

So you are giving me a choice. Don't play a caster with an open spell list, don't roleplay, or play a suicidal character. And given that I find pre Bo9S fighters tedious, monotonous, and repetitive, this isn't acceptable either. And the skill system is annoying so rogues are out. Which lead to me specialising in the Bard. Because this was literally the only core class I could use that wasn't incredibly annoying and didn't mean I needed to roleplay someone who didn't care much whether he or she lived or died. (I could, I suppose, have picked the sorceror instead).

I do not believe that making me play a character who does not value their own life highly if I am to play a spellcaster is a feature.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Where I, for one, would like to see the system designed to punish that style of play harshly enough that it would mostly just go away; as it inevitably wrecks the game for the rest of us. In any edition.
My guess is they're trying to appeal to those whose end goal is to play the game rather than break it.

It is impossible to design a system to punish people who set out to understand it. Which is what is at the root of all optimisation. The best you can do is produce a balanced system (as Gygax realised) so that the marginal gains for optimisation are small.

Sure it is. You just make it laborious enough to do that it's a waste of time.

This from the person who never uses a monster straight out of the monster manual? Seriously, all you've done by making it more labourious is set a challenge. Which just makes it more interesting to unpick the system and work out how it works.

Optimisation is a game in its own right - and can be seen as a mix of simulationist and gamist play. The simulationist element of finding out what is there and how it works combined with the gamist element of keeping score. The harder you make it to figure out what is there the more of a challenge it becomes.

As for making it laborious for the people who want to just produce a powerful character, this might have worked before the internet. But the first guides - the first netdecks - will hit within a couple of weeks of launch produced by people who like understanding how things work and the kudos they get for this. And once they are out there anyone with google and an interest can follow them.

Same point applies on a larger scale, though - does the game really have to be designed to rein in the one table in 10 that's going to go out of their way to break it?

If the game is well designed, yes. Gygax did it. 4e did it. 3e set out to reward system mastery.

I find this interesting: as a self-admitted optimizer you choose to run the edition that is least suited to optimization. Is this because your players won't rein themselves in?

As another self-admitted optimiser, one of the reasons I love 4e is that I can't break it. I know most of the tricks in 3.X (and managed to create 20th level characters in 3e with four iterative attacks and 9th spells).

Optimisation for power simply isn't fun in play - but in a game with a hideous power disparity (like 3.X) you need to know what level of optimisation everyone else is using to know where to aim at. If someone's using a netbook you probably need to break out optimisation-for-power in self defence.

On the other hand in a game with minor power disparity and a lot of options (e.g. 4e) allows me to take an interesting character concept and build to it - for instance the princess or hanger on who mostly runs round screaming but the party wouldn't be the same without. (Lazy Warlord or Bard). I get the same creative satisfaction of a job well done when building Martel, my Warlord (who was an extremely reckless party strategic reserve - waiting before throwing himself into the fray with almost reckless abandon, Leonidas style) as I do in building a wizard able to shatter the earth in 3.X.

To not use the tools I have to polish my character in character creation feels like leaving the job half finished, and it's going to irritate me for as long as I play that character. But with a balanced system doing the job properly is going to add depth and colour to the character and is unlikely to crack the game. On the other hand to e.g. intentionally pick a bad spell loadout feels like I'm deliberately lobotomising the character.

 

[Grydan]

Sure it is. You just make it laborious enough to do that it's a waste of time.

And how, exactly, do you propose going about doing that?

Do you overwhelm the optimizer with too many options to choose from?
Well, no, because this is the sort of environment that optimization thrives in. 3.X, even if you don't take advantage of all of the non-WotC OGL content available, offers more customization options than any other edition. It's also always had a lively char-op community. The more options that are on the table, the more opportunities there are for finding and exploiting combinations the designers overlooked.

Do you take the opposite approach and keep options at a bare minimum?
Well, this certainly limits the enjoyment of optimization oriented players, but it's not by making it laborious. The fewer options on the table, the easier it is to spot which ones are best. It also means you're taking away all of that customization from everyone.

Do you bury it in complex math?
This raises the barrier a bit, making it harder to get into the optimization game. However, for many optimizers it's the sort of thing that's right up their alley. Crunching numbers to find the non-obvious advantage? Music to their ears. For those that don't have the head for the math, once the number crunchers have the system in their hands for a few minutes, someone will share the results, removing the barrier completely. There's also the fact that you likely scare away a good chunk of those who don't pay attention to optimization, as they opt for the choices that don't require a math degree. That makes the gap between the optimizers and the non-optimizers larger.

Even if you can find a barrier, something that makes the combing through options process tedious and unwieldy, as long as some degree of imbalance between choices exists, someone, somewhere, is going to put in the effort to find it. And then they'll tell other people about it, and those people get all of the benefit of knowing the best choices, without any of the tedious, unwieldy, laborious barriers.

But it is possible to have mechanics that tend to dissuade specialisaion and encourage diversification in PC build, for example - whereas, in practice, a lot of optimisation in a game like 3E or 4e is based around specialisation.

Or to have mechanics which offer few and constrained places for player choice about build. (RuneQuest and Classic Traveller are examples of this.)

I'm not advocating for those mechanics - especially not for D&D, which historically, and especially since 3E, has taken a different approach - but they do exist.

Oh, absolutely, you can discourage specialization. I think it's even a worthy goal. D&D tends to over-reward and under-punish specialization*, I think.

Next's dropping the Fort/Ref/Will saves/defences and changing them to ability saves is a decent step in that direction. Where a 4E character can have a perfectly decent Will defence while dumping their Charisma or Wisdom stat, as long as the other gets a decent score, a Next character that dumps either is leaving themselves a weak spot that can be targeted.

Admittedly, this is counteracted to an extent by making it harder to target those weaknesses than it would be in 4E, where almost any character, monster, or NPC can find a way to target any one of your defences with a damaging attack at least once in a fight.

But making specialization less optimal isn't punishing optimization. It's making diversification more optimal. The target has changed, the process hasn't.

* Of course, this doesn't apply equally to all aspects of the game, nor does it apply equally to all classes.

A 3.X fighter is rewarded for becoming hyper-specialized in their tactics, and effectively punished for trying to diversify. A 3.X wizard can quite easily get the best of both worlds, using spell selection to decide each day whether to be a generalist or a specialist (and with enough spells to choose from, a specialist in a different thing each day).

A 4E character that tries to specialize in dealing one specific type of damage (other than the heavily rewarded cold damage) will find that it is often of little benefit, and can easily become a dangerous weakness. If all you ever do is fire damage, you better have picked one of the character types that has a way of avoiding the ubiquitous fire resistance, found on more creatures than pretty much any other damage resistance. Meanwhile, unless you know you're going to be dealing with wall-to-wall trolls, you're not going to encounter all that many enemies who care about the difference between fire damage and untyped damage in a way that hurts them more than it hurts you.

---

Any time that player choice exists alongside imbalance, optimization will be rewarded.

You can remove imbalance, but it takes a good deal of effort, constant supervision, will never be perfect, and lots of players seem to take issue with the idea.

You can remove player choice, but it makes the game a good deal less interesting, and it's simply impossible to remove entirely.

 

[Yora]

I think the best scenario would be a game in which it doesn't really matter much how balanced things are.
A game in which every character has clear limitations what he can do and what he can't do. It does not matter if a warrior can attack harder in battle than a rogue can attack from stealth, because those are two different situations that require different characters to use different abilities.
And it would not matter if a wizard can kill 20 goblins at once at 5th level, as long as he can not kill a troll with just a single spell. While at the same time a fighter can kill the troll with three or four rounds of combat.

In such a case, there isn't really much that would need balance. Different classes are able to do different things and it is up to the players to come up with plans that get the most effect out of the parties abilities. All the balance you need would be things like making sure that it is always better to have a rogue backstab a single large enemy than to have a warrior attack it.

And I think easily 98% of things that are a problem in 3rd Edition are spells, feats that modify spells, and class features that modify spellcasting. And the later two only become a problem because of the first one.
If one would attempt to make a balanced version of 3rd Edition, one could pretty much only work on changing and removing spells that allow spellcasters to do things better than the classes that are specialist for the same thing.
(That, and monks being able to use their two main features at the same time.)

 

[Magil]

I generally agree with your posts around this issue, but not with this particular point. Choices can matter although they have no implication for mechanical effectivenss: they can matter because of the change they make to the shared fiction. A game like HeroWars/Quest relies heavily upon this dimension of meaningfulness. A game like Burning Wheel or 4e relies upon it less, but still relies upon it to an extent: because 4e, for example, assumes that the GM is adapting encounter difficulty to reflect the level and general prowess of the PCs, to some extent optimising has no effect on relative effectiveness. The reward for having a tougher PC is a "story" reward - the fictional stakes are higher (eg you're fighting Orcus) - rather than a mecanical reward - the combats are still just as mecahnically challenging, because the GM has stepped them up.

A player might also get a degree of pleasure from the absolute effectiveness of his/her PC (eg my 20th level PC can solo Orcus!) but if that's the sole or even principal pleasure you're getting from an RPG, my feeling is you're missing out.

There is a contrast here with a game like, say, classic D&D, where improved absolute effectiveness is expected to also produce a degree of improved relative effectiveness. D&Dnext seems to be going back this way, too, with bounded accuracy.

I think this change away from the 4e approach to scaling and setting encounter difficulties may make it easier to break the game via optimisation.

Saying they are "meaningless" was a bit of an oversimplification, I agree. However, where there are choices, optimization will exist--I can't help but feel that will be the case, always, for the kinds of games I want to play. There will always be choices that are better than other choices, and the only way to stop that from happening is to remove choice altogether. And I strongly feel that choices should mean something within the system, not just the story.

I don't know if I'd say that pleasure derived from the mechanical aspects of gameplay is my principal source of enjoyment in playing/DMing these games, but even if it were for someone, I do not feel it's for others to judge whether they're "missing out" or what not. I do know that it's largely why I got into it, and where I tend to devote the largest amount of my efforts. In any case, I feel my way of enjoying the game is just as legitimate as anyone else's.

Same point applies on a larger scale, though - does the game really have to be designed to rein in the one table in 10 that's going to go out of their way to break it?

Considering I doubt you have any non-antecedental numbers to back anything like this up, this is hearsay at best.

I find this interesting: as a self-admitted optimizer you choose to run the edition that is least suited to optimization. Is this because your players won't rein themselves in?

Not at all, it has nothing to do with the players. In fact, 4th edition has some massive imbalances. They're just the kinds if imbalances I can live with. For example, really terrible powers exist alongside amazing powers, and so-narrowly-situational-it-hurts feats exist alongside "any character can use this, often!" feats. You can still screw up your character, hard, in DnD 4E. Of course, built-in retraining rules and an overall more forgiving system help to deal with that. More importantly to me, however, class imbalance isn't a major issue. Characters will generally have equal opportunity to contribute, despite being very different, with minimal fudging from the DM required.

Further, I don't find 4E generic at all. I've played several games, and been DMing one for more than a year now. Each experience has been very different, and every time a player changes or returns or whatever, things become very different in feel and play, both from a storytelling perspective and a mechanical perspective. I also played a fair amount of 3rd edition before the switch, and I have no desire to go back to that style of gameplay--I knew 4th edition was way better for my way of playing from the very start.

 

[slobo777]

And I think easily 98% of things that are a problem in 3rd Edition are spells, feats that modify spells, and class features that modify spellcasting. And the later two only become a problem because of the first one.
If one would attempt to make a balanced version of 3rd Edition, one could pretty much only work on changing and removing spells that allow spellcasters to do things better than the classes that are specialist for the same thing.
(That, and monks being able to use their two main features at the same time.)

Yes spells. They often retained their spell level when moving from AD&D to 3E, without making allowances for how they affected the game, and how they shifted balance of class effectiveness around. The general feel I get from looking at the 3E and before spell lists is a collection of cool ideas bundled into a self-referential power scheme. 4th-level spells are better than 3rd-level spells etc, but the relative power level is only attempted with any rigour within the spell lists - outside of the spell system, in comparison to non-casters, the effect on class/class balance is only considered very loosely.

Using a spell slot up is a small, short-term resource. Usually less than 1/4 of what the caster can do in a day. So it makes sense to compare that 1/4-of-what-I-can-do-per-day versus what other classes are supposed to excel at at the same level. Or perhaps what one spell slot spent on one combat could do (assuming a game goal of 4 "meaningful" combats in a moderate difficulty day).

A 3rd-level spell for instance should not cause the caster to outperform a 5th-level fighter over the course of a combat, or auto-solve an exploration problem suitable for a 5th-level rogue. If the same spell had impact roughly equal to what a 3rd/4th level rogue or fighter could do, then a Wizard can still contribute (and get to choose flexibly how and when to do so, which is a benefit), but not outshine those two classes at what they are best at.

That doesn't necessarily mean removing spells or moving spell levels around, but it might mean adjusting the rules for them. The combined rules for Invisibility and Stealth for example should make it clear that any non-Stealth expert with invisibility cast on them is not quite as effective as a level 3 Rogue who has specialised in stealth, but who is not invisible. There are lots of routes to this - shorter durations, ensuring that Hidden is a better game mechanic than Invisible etc, etc.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This from the person who never uses a monster straight out of the monster manual?

You seem to assume that this is somehow laborious or difficult, which I don't get. It isn't.

Seriously, all you've done by making it more labourious is set a challenge. Which just makes it more interesting to unpick the system and work out how it works.

Yes, it certainly does. Nothing wrong with that.

Optimisation is a game in its own right - and can be seen as a mix of simulationist and gamist play. The simulationist element of finding out what is there and how it works combined with the gamist element of keeping score. The harder you make it to figure out what is there the more of a challenge it becomes.

I think I've probably undersold my point. There's making it hard for the player, and making it hard for the character. If you add in new rules elements that make Charisma worthwhile for everyone, or add in prerequisites or drawbacks for powerful spells, you've made it harder for both the character and the player. The bottom line (that your cleric can raise the dead and your wizard can teleport across the country and your fighter just attacks people) hasn't changed, but the landscape of a typical game changes greatly.

As for making it laborious for the people who want to just produce a powerful character, this might have worked before the internet. But the first guides - the first netdecks - will hit within a couple of weeks of launch produced by people who like understanding how things work and the kudos they get for this. And once they are out there anyone with google and an interest can follow them.

The average player doesn't have that interest though. Personally, I like the guides, and refer my players to them sometimes, but they tend to assume a narrower style of play than I like, and they tend to actually help me find the overpowered combos and other rules abuses I need to ban. DMs read these things too.

If the game is well designed, yes. Gygax did it. 4e did it. 3e set out to reward system mastery.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that 3e rewarding system mastery is a problem. This is essentially the same as saying that baseball rewarding better hand-eye coordination and more time spent in the batting cage is a problem, or that grandmasters being better at chess than amateurs is a problem. Of course people who are more knowledgeable or more driven make better characters. If two people set out to make characters of different power levels, or if two people of different skill levels tried to make characters the same power level, and one character wasn't clearly better than the other, that would be a problem.

I struggle to see where system mastery is not rewarded in any version of D&D, but more importantly, I struggle to see why you think it shouldn't be.

That's tricky, because what is a "waste of time" for one person is "a worthy challenge" for another. It also seems to me to be pretty much guaranteed to backfire, no matter how you went about it.

D&D is indeed diverse.

If you make character optimization not pay off, however, then you have an impossibly generic system, because your choices don't matter at all. The system would have to be "perfectly balanced."

It's amazing to me that some people on these boards don't seem to see that.

 

[pemerton]

Any time that player choice exists alongside imbalance, optimization will be rewarded.

You can remove imbalance, but it takes a good deal of effort, constant supervision, will never be perfect, and lots of players seem to take issue with the idea.

You can remove player choice, but it makes the game a good deal less interesting, and it's simply impossible to remove entirely.

I'm not sure that it's so hard to make a system without significant imbalance and with player choice: HeroWars/Quest is an example. PCs are built out of freeform descriptors, with a certain number of good and middling bonuses to assign to them, and rules on the GM side to balance broad against narrow descriptors.

The scope for player choice isn't in relation to the dimension of mechanical effectiveness, but rather in relation to the fiction that a given PC generates and leverages (via the descriptors chosen).

Admittedly this is quite different from D&D, and especially 3E and 4e D&D; and it requires dropping all pretence to simulationism in your PC build rules. But 4e is definitely closer to this than 3E: more of the difference between PCs occurs in the realm of the fiction, as there is a greater degree of mechanical homogeneity (eg the AEDU structure; the fact that bards' harsh words do damage, but it's [psychic] rather than untyped).

However, where there are choices, optimization will exist--I can't help but feel that will be the case, always, for the kinds of games I want to play.

Because I'm not sure what kinds of games you want to play, it's hard for me to judge the truth of this! My point is more modest - that there can be RPGs with meaningful choice but no mechanical optimisation.

A clear example: if I buy my PC the power "Deal handily with undead" and you buy your PC the power "Deal handily with corrupt governmental officials", and if the encounter design rules tell the GM to build encounters that reflect the signals sent by the players in buidling their PCs, then neither of us is more optimal than the other - in play, for example, we can expect to have to deal with a city government corrupted by a death cult. But the choice to build the different PCs is still meaningful - my PC is going to live out the story of Van Helsing, yours the story of Antonio Di Pietro.

I strongly feel that choices should mean something within the system, not just the story.

Well, in the above example, the choices have systemic significance: when we enter the town hall to confront the corrupt mayor, your PC has the advantage - until the mayor reveals that he is really a vampire, at which point my PC has the advantage! But, on the assumption that the GM is following the scenario and encounter-building guidelines, there is no question of one PC being optimal compared to the other.

you can discourage specialization.

<snip>

But making specialization less optimal isn't punishing optimization. It's making diversification more optimal. The target has changed, the process hasn't.

I think that this proposition, as you state it, is a bit abstract. I'm not sure if you're grounding it in play experience of a system that encourages diversified PCs.

What I have in mind is this: that once PCs are diversified, and the GM - in response - starts framing a wide range of challenges, which both collectively and invididually invite different ways of responding to them, then the likelihood that any given PC is going to consistently have the "I win" button reduces, I think.

Of course, this is only true if there is no PC build that dominates others in all the salient domains of PC activity.

A 3.X wizard can quite easily get the best of both worlds, using spell selection to decide each day whether to be a generalist or a specialist (and with enough spells to choose from, a specialist in a different thing each day).

The 3E wizard is a case of a build that does dominate other PC builds in most of the salient domains of PC activity - in particular because you can rebuild your PC every game day. A system based on balance via diversification won't work under those parameters, I don't think, unless the options for the rebuilding PC are markedly weaker than those of the fixed PCs.

A 4E character that tries to specialize in dealing one specific type of damage (other than the heavily rewarded cold damage) will find that it is often of little benefit, and can easily become a dangerous weakness.

True, especially for [fire] as you note. But it also lets you stack all the feats/items etc that enchance or play off one particular damage type or keyword.

In fact, 4th edition has some massive imbalances. They're just the kinds if imbalances I can live with. For example, really terrible powers exist alongside amazing powers, and so-narrowly-situational-it-hurts feats exist alongside "any character can use this, often!" feats. You can still screw up your character, hard, in DnD 4E. Of course, built-in retraining rules and an overall more forgiving system help to deal with that. More importantly to me, however, class imbalance isn't a major issue. Characters will generally have equal opportunity to contribute, despite being very different, with minimal fudging from the DM required.

I strongly agree with all of this - your comments about retraining, about the forgiving nature of the system, about the PC differentiation that gives PCs equal opportunities to contribute, and about how these compensate for the evident imbalances that the system makes possible.

 

[pemerton]

It's amazing to me that some people on these boards don't seem to see that.

Because it's not true. It assumes that the only dimension of meaningful choice is mechanical effectiveness. Games like Maelstrom Storytelling and HeroWars/Quest show that this need not be so.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think the best scenario would be a game in which it doesn't really matter much how balanced things are.
A game in which every character has clear limitations what he can do and what he can't do.

The only way you are going to get that is by having a game where if something isn't listed on your character sheet you can not do it. And that might work in a boardgame or tabletop wargame but is utterly unacceptable in an RPG.

You seem to assume that this is somehow laborious or difficult, which I don't get. It isn't.

What it means is that you need to be several steps ahead of your players and know in advance what you are going to throw at them. I need to use monsters at 3 seconds notice sometimes.

I think I've probably undersold my point. There's making it hard for the player, and making it hard for the character. If you add in new rules elements that make Charisma worthwhile for everyone, or add in prerequisites or drawbacks for powerful spells, you've made it harder for both the character and the player. The bottom line (that your cleric can raise the dead and your wizard can teleport across the country and your fighter just attacks people) hasn't changed, but the landscape of a typical game changes greatly.

And that doesn't even do anything to slow the optimisers. All you have done is changed balance points. If anything that makes it easier for both the explorers and the munchkins.

DMs read these things too.

Some DMs do. Some of us write them. But the game shouldn't need to be pitched at experts.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that 3e rewarding system mastery is a problem.

You don't. What I'm saying is that deliberately rewarding system mastery is stupid. System mastery brings its own reward. Monte Cook has directly admitted that there are trap options and superior options in 3.0 to put in a reward for people who mastered the system. This is essentially equivalent to giving the grandmaster a rook headstart because he is better at chess.

To be fair, 4e does the same although I don't believe it set out to do it. But it does it in a different way - system mastery in 4e increases the flexibility of the characters you can create rather than the power. Did you know that using just the PHB you can create a highly competative spear and shield fighter in 4e?

 

[billd91]

You've made it very plain that you create characters (and expect others to create characters) for story reasons. Whether something is powerful or weak does not matter to you. So "nerfing certain options" doesn't seem like something that you would care about.

Oh, yes it does, particularly when "nerfing" in this case is narrowing the scope - like a whole lot of the magic in 4e.

 

[billd91]

You don't. What I'm saying is that deliberately rewarding system mastery is stupid. System mastery brings its own reward. Monte Cook has directly admitted that there are trap options and superior options in 3.0 to put in a reward for people who mastered the system. This is essentially equivalent to giving the grandmaster a rook headstart because he is better at chess.

OK, you link right to it but you're also saying, pretty much directly, that you're missing his point. He says there are superior options, sure, but the so called "trap" options are not described as such. They're not traps and they're not actually "Timmy" cards. They're weaker options that have their uses, most of which won't apply to PCs in most circumstances, and that would have been better served with more explanation in that regard.