woodelf said:
No, i said dual-classing was rare. Multi-classing was fairly common--probably about half the PCs (without pulling out the character sheets--i still have most of them--to double check).
Given the volume of characters you apparently had, it is hard to see how you could remember things that accurately, but we can take your word for it. It is likely, though, that you got used to the idea that demin-human multiclassed characters were overpowered compared to other PCs, and it entered into your gaming pysche as being the "right" way for the game to be.
Zero. I've never run into the phenomenon personally, and it took me a fair bit to parse that acronym when i started running into it online. [And, i'll note that i managed to hang around on r.g.f.misc and r.g.f.advocacy for years before RPGnet or EnWorld came onlin, and nobody ever had need of that term in any context that i ever ran across. I find it a curious phenomenon, and it seems to strangely only be a frequent-enough occurrence in D&D games to have coined a phrase. Not saying that this is inherent to D&D of any flavor, or that it never happens in other games.] Partly, i believed in fudging, and partly i had players who knew i wasn't going to save them, and thus sensibly retreated when things got rough.
Well, since you played with enormous parties (12-20 players is an enormous party, typical RPG group size usually has been three to four players, borne out by reaserch conducted by multiple organization, including WotC), it seems logical that you would not have TPKs that often. That much mass simply overwhelms the problem.
None that i recall. I remember saving individual characters through fudging or, more often, creative interpretation of ambiguous results. But those were few and far between, and the few battles where they were in over their heads, i don't think i had to do that. (And the party was typically 12-20+ PCs, so there was a fair bit of redundancy and a single PC death wouldn't, generally, cascade to everyone else.)
So, basically, this is a confirmation that your RPG experience
is very atypical. Groups that size are (and have been for many years) atypical, and change the dynamic of the game considerably. In other words, your experiences are not particularly valuable for evaluating the impact of the system for the typical player who played in a group with 4-5 people.
Twice. Neither was because of the rules, and in fact they were specifically due to me ignoring/breaking the rules. Both were due to blatant GM favoritism (one of my brother's characters, and my girlfriend's character).
Then you are (a) lucky, or (b) not remembering or (c) didn't notice. Given that you had more than a dozen players at the table, I'd say that there is a strong liklihood that you simply didn't notice.
So, in other words, the classes are only properly balanced if you play in the style assumed? The further you stray from that (such as by using tougher, rather than more-capable, opponents to challenge a group of disparate combat ability), the less balanced it becomes?
No, they are only balanced if you act as an intelligent DM. If the only way you can think of the challenge the brick is to throw monsters with high ACs, piles of hit points, and massive damage output at him, then you aren't doing your job very well. Sure, the brick opponent has its place, but if that's all you got, then you should find another spot at the table.
Hideously unbalanced? Sure. Hideously broken? Depends on what it takes for a ruleset to work for your group and playstyle. The only ways in which i found AD&D2 to be broken are things that are still there in D&D3E: fire-and-forget magic, the initiative/multiple attack system, alignment, probably some others i'm not thinking of right now. In fact, i, like most AD&D2 GMs i've known, had extensive houserules for the game.
Which is a sign of a
problem. When I played 1e/2e D&D, I too had a pile of house rules. Now, the only ones I have are campaign specific, and almost trivial in nature.
In my case, about 40pp of small type for the players, plus a bunch of tables and such that i didn't bother to give to them.
40 pages of small type? And you don't find this to be a sign of a problem with the design of the game?
And yet, when D&d3E came out, they had not fixed a single thing that i thought needed fixing--most were essentially unchanged, and a few things that i thought were broken they had made worse--and the things they felt needed fixing were things that i had left untouched--it either had never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with them, or i'd considered the problem so minor as to not be worth the effort to change. My point is not to rip on D&D3E, but to point out that "broken" is a very subjective term in RPGs. Your "broken" is my "not a problem", while your "fixed" is my "aaagh!".
Sure, it could be. But if I had 40 pages of small type in house rules on a game, I'd go looking for another game. If not 3e, then some other RPG that didn't require me to have piles of home-brewed jerry-rigged solutions.
I'm not dismissing your complaints--most of them are true and correct, as far as the rules go. But, simply looking at the rules in a vacuum is not a very useful measure of a game as open-ended as an RPG, IMHO, and proper balance is impossible for the rules, alone, to manage.
It should not be my responsibility, as the consumer, to fix the product to eliminate huge problems with the game from the get go. Large volumes of house rules fixing the game are a sign of a
problem not a strength. The only house rules you should have to put into place are ones that are campaign specific. If you have to fix something as basic as how characters are built, then there is a problem with the game's design.
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