J. Tweet's comments on Swords & Wizardry

[Ariosto]

The "jack of all trades" (and master of fighting) is a staple of RuneQuest, but D&D was designed with distinctively different types -- different, but complimentary, capabilities and strategies.

Yes, it was designed as a strategic game. It is certainly possible to play a series of disconnected scenarios, but it is in the campaign that one experiences the game as a whole.

Adventures into the underworld are usually the most remunerative per game-week, but an expedition into the wilderness may be occasioned by various purposes -- including the plundering of less frequented dungeons.

While Cat is healing, Mouse can be stealing. The deeper one delves, the greater both risk and reward. Reconnaissance pays dividends over wandering aimlessly. The right spell judiciously cast can yield more than a dozen supposedly more "powerful" ones carelessly deployed. Henchmen and hirelings help those who cultivate them. Dead men may tell tales, but they gain no XP ...

There are many, many things to consider and prioritize, to deal with either adroitly or clumsily. The hand of chance plays a role that skill seeks to minimize.

In short, their initial states little predict which characters shall long survive, much less which shall by any other measure be counted far down the line as "winners" or "losers". Some choices are more conservative, while the magic-user is a gamble offering a big payoff for those who play it well and with luck.

The odds are rather against any particular character having a long career, though, if started at 1st level. Playing the same one every session is putting all your eggs in one basket; rotation among a "bullpen", on the other hand, means slower advancement for each (thereby remaining longer in the "kill zone" of low levels).

All of this and more combines to make simplistic assessments of "poor balance" poorly reasoned.

 

[Solomoriah]

Clever ideas can often save the day.

Indeed, and clever ideas are FAR more interesting than cool feats or fancy magic items.

Because ANYONE can have a cool feat, or a fancy magic item. But a clever idea? Priceless.

If a Wizard can out-rogue a rogue or out-fight a fighter, that is still a problem. It's not like the player is ill-suited to play a rogue, it is just that a rogue is just not the best of the job he is supposed to perform.

Not sure how this would ever happen.

Oh, I could be nasty to a thief player, by seeing to it that the magic-user ended up with elven cloak and boots, gauntlets of climbing, and a wand full of knock spells. But in general, your statement is false for the games I play.

 

[Mallus]

Indeed, and clever ideas are FAR more interesting than cool feats or fancy magic items.

Because ANYONE can have a cool feat, or a fancy magic item. But a clever idea? Priceless.

This is absolutely true...

... but it's also irrelevant in a discussion of class balance. It's not a compelling reason to distribute useful mechanical descriptors/perks/abilities unevenly across the character classes.

"Say, this class doesn't get a lot of cool things to do"
"Well, you can always try having a good idea."

Why is this good design, again?

Let me trot out my all-purpose Party Analogy. It's true that a person can have fun at a party without drinking alcohol. Solely through sparkling conversation, for example. This does not mean a good host should randomly decide to serve some guests wine and others tap water.

 

[Solomoriah]

"Say, this class doesn't get a lot of cool things to do"
"Well, you can always try having a good idea."

Why is this good design, again?

Um... in S&W, and BFRPG, and LL:

Fighters fight,
Magic-users cast spells,
Clerics fight some, and cast spells some, and generally provide support to the party, and
Thieves sneak around and steal things, and sometimes apply a cowardly poke in the back.

In terms of the number of different things the standard classes do, the thieves are actually ahead of the fighters and magic-users. So are clerics, a class I find not many people prefer to play (at least, hereabouts).

But anyone can have a good idea.

Lots of hard-and-fast rules, with details for every possible situation, leaves the players needing to consult the rulebooks to decide what they want to try, and the GM doing the same to see if they can do it. Relatively few, very simple rules allow the GM and players to look beyond the rules and think in terms of the characters. My ideal game would provide excellent simulation of fantastic reality with the rules largely invisible to the players. Of course, that's not possible, so I settle for the best I can get.

If you are offended by "DM Fiat" then you won't like these games. If you are in love with lots of detailed, named and numbered options (feats, etc.) then you won't like them either.

But if you like a game that plays FAST and needs little preparation time for the GM, then these might be the games for you.

Let me trot out my all-purpose Party Analogy. It's true that a person can have fun at a party without drinking alcohol. Solely through sparkling conversation, for example. This does not mean a good host should randomly decide to serve some guests wine and others tap water.

See, here it is again. It seems that you think that classic games treat some characters better than others. I disagree. What it comes down to is this: In some situations, some classes or races have advantages over others; but they pay for those advantages with disadvantages in other situations. The "balance" is not mechanically precise, because outside of combat, it appears impossible to make the balance mechanically precise. There is no good metric for determining if game balance is "correct" in all non-combat situations. For this reason, modern games tend to focus on balancing combat while ignoring the other situations. But this leads to a combat focus in the mechanics that I don't really like all that much, and further, it leads to homogenizing the classes so that the choice of class really doesn't matter, balance-wise.

For a choice to matter, there have to be both good and bad consequences regardless of the decision, and the player must choose which set of good and bad he or she will accept. How you deal with limitation is as important as how you deal with capability.

...

One of the things that really amazes me in modern games is how players will sit down and spend a mess of time generating a first level character... and know in advance what that character will look like at level 20. Egad. Where's the fun in that?

The first campaign I ever ran had two thieves as the core PCs. Yes, thieves, that much-maligned class. They stole and fought and slunk through a number of adventures, collecting comrades and discarding them again (or losing them outright to the scythe of the reaper) until they somehow became heros. In the process, they died a few times, but never both at once (so there was always one to pay to raise the other). Then came the day when one was slain by a sea dragon, and too little remained to raise. So he was reincarnated... as a halfling. (In BX, which we played back then, a halfling was effectively just a kind of fighter.) He paid a magic-user (the same one who reincarnated him, if I recall rightly) to Polymorph him back to a human. Of course, he had to worry about Dispel Magic from then on. But that lowly thief became a renowned warrior and eventually a king. His thiefly associate remained with him until the very end of the campaign.

They had no idea when they started where they would end up. No "career planning" there. And we really did prefer it that way... still do.

 

[Ourph]

Who says fancy descriptions won't kill the dragon?

IME, usually the DM.

Clever ideas can often save the day.

Yes, if the DM decides to adjudicate it that way. All too often, I've found, old-school DMs tend to be of the mind that "If I didn't think of it, it's not clever enough to work". So for this kind of gameplay to work, the players can't just come up with ANY clever idea. They have to come up with the clever idea that the DM already thought up to get around his insurmountable-by-combat challenge.

I have been fortunate enough to play with two DMs, in about 30 years of gaming, who really did a good job running a heavy fiat game where player ingenuity was greatly rewarded (or thwarted in entertaining fashion). But that's 2 out of around 30-40 DMs.

 

[ExploderWizard]

IME, usually the DM.


Yes, if the DM decides to adjudicate it that way. All too often, I've found, old-school DMs tend to be of the mind that "If I didn't think of it, it's not clever enough to work". So for this kind of gameplay to work, the players can't just come up with ANY clever idea. They have to come up with the clever idea that the DM already thought up to get around his insurmountable-by-combat challenge.

I have been fortunate enough to play with two DMs, in about 30 years of gaming, who really did a good job running a heavy fiat game where player ingenuity was greatly rewarded (or thwarted in entertaining fashion). But that's 2 out of around 30-40 DMs.

I'm sorry you had to play with such crappy DM's.

 

[HywayWolf]

I'm sorry you had to play with such crappy DM's.

IME, usually the DM.


Yes, if the DM decides to adjudicate it that way. All too often, I've found, old-school DMs tend to be of the mind that "If I didn't think of it, it's not clever enough to work". So for this kind of gameplay to work, the players can't just come up with ANY clever idea. They have to come up with the clever idea that the DM already thought up to get around his insurmountable-by-combat challenge.

I have been fortunate enough to play with two DMs, in about 30 years of gaming, who really did a good job running a heavy fiat game where player ingenuity was greatly rewarded (or thwarted in entertaining fashion). But that's 2 out of around 30-40 DMs.

Since the proportion of good DMs to bad DMs is out of sync with the actual success of the game, is it possible that the game works for many people even with average DMs, but just not for you?

 

[Solomoriah]

Go easy on him, Hyway. Bad GMs are probably the number one reason old-school games die.

I think I've been pretty good at it for some time, but I know I got better as a result of many conversations on Dragonsfoot and other forums. DM Fiat got a bad name as a result of many maladjusted DM's. Of course, there is probably a similar percentage of maladjusted players.

You have to want to learn to be better before you get better (and you have to accept that you aren't perfect before you will want to be better... so many DM's can't accept that they aren't the best there is).


... oh, yeah. Tommy is talking to Simon ...

 

[Ourph]

Its possible that you are a statistical anomaly, but usually numbers like that would indicate the problem didn't lie with the DMs.

Implied insults aside, you're absolutely right. The problems weren't with the DMs (who were great DMs in many other ways) it's that the heavy DM fiat style of gaming requires a charismatic, witty, mature, outgoing, confident DM who isn't preoccupied by thoughts of work, upcoming tests, relationship problems, children or a hangover in order to be done well. And that type of DM just doesn't come along very often. It's a great game when all of those things come together, but campaigns like that (again, IME) are catching lightning in a bottle. Even the same DM might not be able to pull it off on a weekly basis.

 

[Solomoriah]

Even the same DM might not be able to pull it off on a weekly basis.

Some game sessions go better than others, but really, it isn't that hard. Not if you are running a low-maintenance game like S&W, LL, or BFRPG. I spend an hour or so per four hour session getting ready to game, and as far as being distracted... this is how I relax, so no big thing.