[L&L] Balancing the Wizards in D&D

[Bluenose]

For me, the game is the flavor every bit as much as the mechanics. I don't really see how it can be otherwise because then there's little to keep D&D distinct from other games.

So, you might play Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Mystara, Eberron, or any of half a hundred published settings or thousands of homebrews. Do you expect the flavour to be the same in all of those? Because it really, really, shouldn't be.

 

[pemerton]

While old movies may be really excellent their producers only had limited choices. We have more choices now. Does that automatically mean newer techniques = better movies? No. OTOH if you really understand the field you would have a bigger pallete to draw from when you go to make your movie.

With movies it is more complex than that, though. It's not just about creating a visual effect. Part of what a movie does is play on the viewer's knowledge of how the visual effect was created, and what that required.

So part of what is amazing about the railroad scene in Lawrence of Arabia is that you (the viewer) know that they blew up a train!

On the whole I think Eyes Wide Shut is a bad film, but it would be even less interesting if you (the viewer) didn't know that, when it was shot, the lead performers were a married couple.

That's one reason, I think, why CGI-ish cinema can have trouble evoking the same depth of emotional response.

In my experience, a lot of RPGers don't actually want to make meaningful choices while playing. They want to be entertained. If you make a game that relies on meaningful choices, it's going to be a problem.

To relate this to my movie point: It's sometimes said that "the story" of an RPG game is the post-session transcript. That may be true for some meaining of the phrase "the story", but there's more to it than that. The participants - who, as a general rule, are the only ones to pay any attention to the story - know how it was produced.

At least for me, the way it was produced matters. I want it to have not been pre-packaged, but likewise to not just be the product of chance. I want it to emerge from decisions that the particpants - both players, playing their PCs, and the GM, adjudicating action resolution (including sometimes by playing NPCs/monsters) - have made during the course of actual play.

These decisions become meaningful because, upon subsequent reflection, they matter in this way.

 

[billd91]

So, you might play Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Mystara, Eberron, or any of half a hundred published settings or thousands of homebrews. Do you expect the flavour to be the same in all of those? Because it really, really, shouldn't be.

And thanks to the flavor of D&D in the core rules, most of those share A LOT in common. And I'm grateful they do. I don't want to have to relearn everything whenever a new campaign starts up in another person's homebrew or published setting game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think this goes a LONG way towards explaining the difference of opinion that floats around. To me, 4e is very much an evolutionary change for 3e. Virtually all the systems in 4e come from 3e. There are very few elements in 4e that didn't appear in almost exactly that form, at some point in 3e. Skills work the same, combat is largely the same, although saving throws are an obvious change, as well as NAD's. Most of the task resolution systems are ported over largely unchanged from 3e to 4e.

Whereas I look at 2e to 3e and see that as truly revolutionary. Virtually none of the systems in 3e appear in 2e. Feats are a completely new addition. The skill system is completely different. Combat is changed in a thousand different ways - 5 foot grid, AOO's, out of turn actions (something that is greatly increased in 4e), on and on. Heck, even the meaning of the base stats are entirely different and on a different scale. A 16 Str in 3e and 4e means exactly the same thing. And it's completely different from what a 16 Str means in AD&D (1e or 2e). There's a reason that your 18 Str character got converted to like a 22 or 24 Str in 3e using the WOTC conversion rules.

So, yeah, I think this, right here, gets right to the heart of the different ways of seeing the games. After all, flavour wise, 3e and 1e are a lot closer together. I'll totally cop to that. The cosmology, alignments, the races, monsters, etc. are pretty much pulled directly forward. And 4e's flavour changes are significant and probably rightly called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

It's all about what you see as "the game". To me, the flavour bits are usually an afterthought because I almost always run homebrew settings. Great Wheel cosmology? Never used it. Alignment? Well, used it and it caused me WAY too many headaches. Tolkien Races? Haven't had a pure Tolkien group in about twenty-five years. Whenever the Dragonlance player's book came out which had Minotaurs in it. That would have been about the last time I saw a group with all standard races.

So, yeah, it's all about perception.

Seems like there are elements of 'truth' to both ways of looking at it. In SOME respects 3e maintains closer contact with the feel and lore of older editions, but in some ways not at all. The basic lore is taken pretty much from late 2e, and many of the rules innovations are too, as well as the "lots of options for your character" basic concept. Spellcasting wasn't really materially changed. Everything else is pretty much mechanically all new in 3e. It is certainly mechanically IMHO as big a jump as 4e, maybe more in some ways.

The main thing with 3e though to me is that fundamentally up to that point the ENTIRE focus of the game was aimed at the table and at what happened IN the game. While the last bit of 2e did kind of bridge over (we never used any of 2e past the core books basically) fundamentally before 3e you just picked your race/class and got what the book said. Creating a unique character was all RP and story telling.

I really think that 3e marks the big watershed. It is a whole different KIND of game. The whole concept of what engages the players with the game is different. No longer is it about telling stories and playing a role, it is also in a huge way about fiddling with the rules and optimizing characters. That also required a shift in attitude about the rules from being a tool that told you how you could do stuff to a set of restrictions that you had to follow and master so you could play better.

I think 4e is kind of the logical endpoint of that sort of development. People complain, but they're really ultimately complaining about the entire concept behind post-AD&D system.

OTOH my experience is that my 2e and my 4e campaigns have actually run pretty much the same. There's a bit of difference at the level of what sort of encounters and scenarios they best handle, but the basic concept is intact. I'm like you as well, I could give a rat's patooty about old D&D lore. Never ran anything but homebrew, never paid much attention to GW cosmologies and whatnot. Couldn't care less about that stuff. Actually the 4e lore is pretty close to what I used starting in around 1979, lol. I could care less pretty much what they use for 5e though as it is just all fluff.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, you may take comfort in the fact that your line of reasoning will soon apply to 4e. Since 5e will be 'newer = better', 4e must by definition be archaic design and join the quaint and antique 'nostalgia' versions 1-3e

It would be lovely if 5e were to continue the trend and be an improvement over 4e.

Every other full edition has managed it. From D&D to AD&D to 2e to 3e to 4e the game improved. OK, there were stutters within an edition, 1e UA had issues, as did many 2e supplements, Essentials was a definite step down from the rest of 4e, and 3.5 was only about on par with 3.0 (better in some ways, worse in others). But new editions, if only by dropping rules bloat in their early incarnations, were always getting better.

So, empirically, there's every reason to hope for that. Past performance is no guarantee, though, and, the strong emphasis on retro-nostalgic 'feel' over balance and playability we keep hearing from WotC is not encouraging in that regard.

 

[slobster]

It would be lovely if 5e were to continue the trend and be an improvement over 4e.

Every other full edition has managed it.

So, empirically, there's every reason to hope for that.

I have no problem with your post so long as you present it as your opinion. Once you say that "empirically" those opinions are true, though, it smacks a little of flame-baiting.

I honestly think that the designers have pretty wide latitude in rethinking some basics of the D&D game system so long as the game's traditions and culture are treated with reverence. I could be wrong of course, but we'll see how it turns out.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I really think that 3e marks the big watershed. It is a whole different KIND of game. The whole concept of what engages the players with the game is different. No longer is it about telling stories and playing a role, it is also in a huge way about fiddling with the rules and optimizing characters. That also required a shift in attitude about the rules from being a tool that told you how you could do stuff to a set of restrictions that you had to follow and master so you could play better.

3e operated from the premise that the player should be the one to decide how his character would mechanically progress. 3e may have offered too much of a good thing here, but it does not automatically make for less or more roleplaying. It could cut either way.

 

[Hussar]

And thanks to the flavor of D&D in the core rules, most of those share A LOT in common. And I'm grateful they do. I don't want to have to relearn everything whenever a new campaign starts up in another person's homebrew or published setting game.

Really? Greyhawk and DL share a lot in common? Completely different feel, very different sub-genre, races are different, history is totally different, etc. etc. Even presumed play - massive dungeon crawls vs plotsy, story based games, are at 90 degrees to each other.

Considering how much of the flavour of D&D that gets stripped out and replaced by Dragonlance (D&D has ALWAYS used Greyhawk as the baseline), I'd say that it's pretty difficult to say that these are sharing a whole lot.

As someone who is currently playing a Darksun (4e) game, I can say that it is a lot of work relearning a whole bunch of the game to play a different system. But this Darksun game is very, very different from our previous campaign, and very, very different from the Eberron (3e) game we played. And it shares virtually nothing with our Savage Tide or World's Largest Dungeon campaigns. At least not by flavour.

Mechanically? Oh yeah, all d20 based games. Heck, today our 4e monk was just like a 3e monk, fifteen attacks, missing every time.

 

[billd91]

Really?

Yes, really.

Greyhawk and DL share a lot in common?

Yes they do. Do I really need to repeat this?

Completely different feel, very different sub-genre, races are different, history is totally different, etc. etc. Even presumed play - massive dungeon crawls vs plotsy, story based games, are at 90 degrees to each other.

"Presumed" play? What's this "presumed" play? There are lots of GH modules but, oddly enough, you can generate a whole lot of story with them and have a plot driving lots of them together. Remember the supermodule versions?

As someone who is currently playing a Darksun (4e) game, I can say that it is a lot of work relearning a whole bunch of the game to play a different system. But this Darksun game is very, very different from our previous campaign, and very, very different from the Eberron (3e) game we played. And it shares virtually nothing with our Savage Tide or World's Largest Dungeon campaigns. At least not by flavour.

Of all of the published campaigns mentioned above, Dark Sun really is the red-headed step child that does the most to replace the default lore of D&D. The rest all share a lot of flavor, which should be expected since they aren't entirely rewriting everything involved with the flavor of monsters, races, classes, spells, magic items, and so on. They certainly aren't rewriting as much as Dark Sun is rewriting.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Well then clearly the solution is to go back to the math of 1e/2e.

The thing is, it doesn't solve the problem either. When I first started playing it might have. I got so wrapped up in role playing and the idea that "of COURSE Wizards were more powerful...they got to use MAGIC, how could that NOT be more powerful?" that I didn't stop to think about whether it was FAIR that they were more powerful.

But after dealing with constant arguments about one player dominating a session and people feeling completely useless when they show up to play the game for a couple of years and then reading articles in Dragon magazine and here on ENWorld about how 3e was going to fix that by making things BALANCED....well, it changed my way of thinking forever.

There's no going back to ignorance now. If the game had the math of 1e/2e I would simply find the most broken options in the game and exploit them. It would feel wrong to purposefully create a poor character.