Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6594633" data-attributes="member: 996">All the more reason CaS is meaningless. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  But I'm not so much worried about how you use the term, as the use of it promoting the false dichotomy......and I am going to quibble about the meaning of 'balanced.'  'Balance' gets misconstrued.  Encounter balance doesn't mean every encounter gives the same level of challenge, it just means when the DM designs an encounter, it'll present something closer to the intended level of challenge.  That intended level of challenge might be 'cakewalk' or 'overwhelming.'  That encounter design might be altered based on how the party comes to have the encounter, or even deferred until the DM knows the starting conditions (depending on how easy it is to adjust vs design encounters in the system in question - or perhaps on how often the party avoids encounters or seeks out unexpected ones!).Class balance doesn't mean all classes make the same contributions, or even theoretically 'equal' ones (which is pretty difficult to measure, let alone achieve), but that each class presents the player with a meaningful, viable choice.  A large enough theoretical inequality between classes might render one non-viable - whether that inequality is in easily quantified raw power, or in versatility, or highly situational (since RPGs can cover a lot of situations, or campaigns fall into a rut).  A lack of even conceptual differences between two classes would render the choice between them meaningless - people couldn't even tell which class you were playing, until a mechanical resolution came up where they displayed some arbitrary difference that ultimately, gave the same result.  Identical classes or only one class are sometimes held up as examples of 'perfect balance,' when, in fact, they are extreme, and entirely hypothetical, examples of imbalance.  Likewise, monotony is not an example of encounter balance, but of using only a small sub-set of possible encounters.Taking that into account: Now, I think what you were getting at is not balanced encounters, but challenge level with regards to encounters, and not balanced classes, but the extreme case of imbalance of having identical classes.Some folks may try to make every encounter an exactly equal challenge, but I doubt it's commonplace.  Certainly, no version of D&D has ever suggested doing so in its encounter guidelines.  So, in that sense, you're defining CaW by contrasting it with an alternative style that, quite possibly, doesn't exist.Similarly, while some versions of D&D have had pretty bad class balance, none have been so bad as to have only one viable class choice, nor to consist of identical classes (not even close).  So, again, in that same sense, you're defining CaW by contrasting it to an alternative that doesn't exist, at all, at least, not in the context of D&D.   I don't think the label matters.  A better example might be the difference between tailored and status-quo encounters.  Tailored encounters are designed to give a specific challenge to the actual party being played - again, that specific challenge might be anything from 'utterly trivial' to 'absolutely unwinnable,' but is more likely in-between, as trivial & unwinnable scenarios do tend to be a waste of time. Status-quo encounters, OTOH, are designed based on the concept of the world. If the DM envisions a dragon the size of a jumbo jet living on top of a mountain, there it is.  If it happens to need to have 90 HD and do 1000 damage with it's breath weapon based on the system for dragon-creation, too bad for anyone that annoys it. Neither of those is necessarily strictly CaW or CaS, I don't think - and, indeed, you could conceivably come up with the exact same encounters using either method, just using a different process - but I'm guessing the status-quo approach would feel right for a CaW fan.</blockquote>

Verification