I hate game balance!

[Remathilis]

I hated playing a Rogue for what you describe. It was like, nope, no real use for you. The wizard can actually turn COMPLETELY invisible. The best you can do is hide.

*sighs*

It's like your job getting sent overseas.

And then being asked to protect the guy who took it.

Truth, man.

 

[The Little Raven]

In that case, you could very well argue that since the people never change, any attempts to impose "balance" from on high aren't going to do much to solve this problem.

Except that if the mechanics are changed so that the wizard no longer gets an "I WIN!" button at the expense of others, you don't have to worry about the asshat wizard players who stomp all over other people's roles, because he can no longer do so without cheating.

 

[Greg K]

\
When 95% of the rules are written for combat, and you suck at combat, any time combat happens, you're not going to have fun. And that's a lot of not-fun when it comes to combat-intensive games like D&D. .

There was a poll done here and a decent percentage of people played in games where combat was not that important- less than 30% of the game time with many sessions having no combat what so ever. So, maybe, the key is communicating the style of game to be run before character generation to place everyone on the same page.

And before I hear another "Well just don't play with them", look. Maybe you live in a gamer mecca, but in some areas of the country, gamers are rare. You play with who you have, or you don't play.

Hey, I say no gaming is better than bad gaming (defined however one chooses), ymmv.

 

[aurance]

Character Rule 1: It is up to the characters to find the way to survive and succeed. Period. Finis. Life is not fair. Death is even more unfair. Deal with it.

But most of life is pretty damn boring, when simulated as a game. Do you also check for things like random accidents and diseases striking the PCs? Your character is headed to a tavern, and slips and breaks his neck / run over by a cart / struck by lightning in a storm? Catches dysentary and dies of fluid loss through diarrhea? All of that happens in life too.

There are many aspects of life which are modified or glossed over for good gameplay, and balancing player character power can clearly be one of those aspects.

 

[mmu1]

Actually, I had fun in 3.5, 2e, and BECMI. Until level 9. Then the game stopped being fun for anyone other than the wizard and/or cleric. I was then that the martial/mundane classes fell off the map and the spellcasters dominated. If you were the wizard and/or cleric (and the cleric ifandonlyif you weren't the walking medicine chest) the game was great fun. If you were the fighter or the thief/rogue, you watched your role get squished into a pulp and you simply became the wizards groupies keeping the hordes off him until he could unleash the Terror From Above spell and end the encounter. Weee!

Meh. Back before 4E was announced, it was quite common to see threads complaining about how - because of monsters' SR and high saves - a Wizard could hardly do any damage at high levels, and it all came down to someone beating the beastie down with a sword.

Which doesn't really match my experiences, either - in the better games I played in, high-level combat usually involved both enemies that the wizard could blast, and ones pretty resistant to magic that needed to be killed the old-fashioned way.

 

[Psion]

Sadly, the situation you describe has never been the case in D&D.

It most certainly has.

 

[mmu1]

Except that if the mechanics are changed so that the wizard no longer gets an "I WIN!" button at the expense of others, you don't have to worry about the asshat wizard players who stomp all over other people's roles, because he can no longer do so without cheating.

Like I said in the part of my post you didn't quote, this is meaningless unless you're actually ok playing with asshats.

 

[Rechan]

So, maybe, the key is communicating the style of game to be run before character generation to place everyone on the same page.

True, but what happens when you have the "I don't really care for combat" roleplayer in a group with two people who want to hit the dungeon?

The situation is very similar to someone earlier in the thread who described a party consisting of "One dude who does combat, one who does computers, one who does investigations - which means 1 hour per character doing their thing". Being able to have fun the majority of the time is better than a portion.

Hey, I say no gaming is better than bad gaming

Eh. I'm not suggesting "Bad" gaming, so much as "less fun" gaming. I'm not gritting my teeth, shaking my fist saying "Damn you, roleplaying player, how dare you make me make NPCs talk to you!" But, the presence of that situation means that you have to adjust things in ways that don't necessarily suit your needs, or your mood, or effect the game in a different way.

 

[Rechan]

Like I said in the part of my post you didn't quote, this is meaningless unless you're actually ok playing with asshats.

Which ignores the fact that the system reinforces it in the first place.

WHY have a system that is lopsidedly balanced when the only counter-measure is "If someone exploits our broken system, just don't play with them"?

 

[fuzzlewump]

Balance is over-rated. I would far rather have an interesting but not very well balanced game than a game balanced so well it sucked the life and ingenuity out of play in favor of versimilitude breaking mechanical equality and thoughtless gamism.

Surely you jape. But I suppose this makes sense, because as a DM you are able to use all of the spells that you want. Perhaps if you played as the classes which were at the low end of the balance bracket in a combat oriented game. Now, I'm sure you're going to say that you have and you loved being underpowered and still do, but what about magic, an undefinable force, makes it defined as more powerful than constant dedication to martial practice?

After all, that's what this argument hinges on. You say that if broken casters don't exist then the game doesn't appear real. Perhaps it's better to imagine not a low magic world, but a world in which magic is not easily harnessed in the heat of battle. This is why spells are perhaps no more powerful than the steel of a highly dedicated melee fighter. Perhaps you're asking, 'why should I bother having to imagine things in a different way?' and the answer is you don't have to. But, just because magic is different between the new editions doesn't mean one is simply more believable than the other. This would be different if we were talking about something that's supposed to model physics, like one edition saying that an object takes 5 seconds to fall a meter, and the other saying it takes less than a second. But this magic, something that's completely fictional in the first place.

That said, I would suggest playing the game before saying the game lacks ingenuity. If you have, what about the play lacked this feeling? I will say now that from first level there are enough choices and combinations with the rest of the group in combat that our group has used more ingenuity than ever before at low levels, which is all I can speak for in 4th edition.