Older Editions and "Balance" when compared to 3.5

[S'mon]

What? Really? 80% non-combat? Are you serious?

Wow. I don't think, back in the day, we ever had a session that wasn't 80% combat.

The AD&D campaign I ran back in high school starting at 3rd level with twinked-out Unearthed Arcana characters was combat-heavy, although I don't think it came close to 80% combat - I don't even think my current 4e campaign is 80% combat, and that's with fights taking vastly longer.

But the 1e, OD&D and BX games I've GM'd and played more recently eg on dragonsfoot have been about 20% combat at most, and that tallies with eg what I've read about the Dwimmermount campaign on Grognardia, or what I can glean from the 1e DMG about the designer's intent. The simple fact is that low level BTB D&D combat prior to UA was just so lethal that smart players learned to both actively avoid it and heavily stack the odds so that it was nasty, brutish and short - for the enemy.

I think some of the published tournament modules were significantly more combat heavy than this, usually with the expectation of high PC attrition, and usually being written for higher levels. But certainly when I ran non-tournament, 1st level, U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh recently, we spent well under 20% of the time in combat.

 

[S'mon]

The point that you do have is that AD&D was... unhelpful in terms of telling you what the baseline was. I'm not even convinced there was an explicit baseline, although it's been a long time since I paged through my old DMG, so maybe it's got more useful material than I'm remembering.

The 1e PHB has much advice on 'successful play' which demonstrates the game's baseline assumptions. In the 1e DMG there is also the sample dungeon and the random dungeon generation tables - note eg that most rooms do not contain monsters. From what I can tell, in the default mode the PCs gather, the PCs & players plan an expedition into the local dungeon, they go on an 'adventure' into the dungeon, deciding where to go, how deep to delve etc, have several combat & noncombat encounters, and hopefully return safely home at the end of the session.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Yes, the group spokesman/leader was the one with the highest charisma - however, once you get past the first few levels, the most important PCs were the wizards and/or the elf fighter/wizards. They were like Kirk & Spock, while straight classed human PCs were Sulu & Chekhov... still pretty cool at times, but clearly not the stars.

In all honesty, I've never had that experience though.

 

[Dausuul]

They may not be called out as assumptions, but there's a lot you can infer from the DMG.

This is where I take up Hussar's argument that AD&D is becoming a sort of Schrodinger's game which can be observed to have whatever properties are convenient for its proponents' debating points.

Some people played AD&D and didn't have balance problems. Other people played AD&D and did have balance problems. If the game had a clear set of baseline assumptions, we could observe what happens when you play according to those assumptions and determine whether the game was balanced or not.

But when you have to fall back on "inference from the DMG," you're admitting that the game has no clear set of core assumptions--because inference is totally subjective. I played in a number of different groups back in the day, and they all drew inferences from the DMG and the PHB about how the game was supposed to work, and they all thought their inferences were obvious and logical. And every dang table was playing the game a different way.

Either there is a baseline or there isn't. If people are arguing about it, there probably isn't.

And, frankly, with the design of 1e, there's a lot more tolerance in the system than in the over-designed 3e and 4e. So minor deviations from the assumptions won't exactly shatter the balance in the system... unlike 3e and 4e.

Or, it's nearly impossible to see how any given change affects balance, because 1E-style balance includes ideas like "It's balanced over the course of a campaign" and "Some characters are more powerful in combat, but that's balanced by other characters having more options out of combat." I mean, how could you possibly show something is unbalanced under those conditions? There's always room to reply, "The campaign just didn't run long enough (or it ran too long)," and "Your game just has too much combat (or not enough)."

Hence the need for an explicit baseline if any discussion of balance is to mean anything. You can't say whether characters are balanced over the course of a campaign unless you know how long a campaign is supposed to be. You can't say whether combat is balanced against noncombat unless you know how much combat there is.

 

[Dausuul]

The AD&D campaign I ran back in high school starting at 3rd level with twinked-out Unearthed Arcana characters was combat-heavy.

But the 1e, OD&D and BX games I've GM'd and played more recently eg on dragonsfoot have been about 20% combat at most, and that tallies with eg what I've read about the Dwimmermount campaign on Grognardia, or what I can glean from the 1e DMG about the designer's intent.

I think some of the published tournament modules were significantly more combat heavy than this, usually with the expectation of high PC attrition, and usually being written for higher levels.

This is exactly what I mean when I say 1E didn't have a baseline. You did it one way in high school--but you do it a different way now, and you think the 1E DMG supports that--but the published tournament modules did it a third way!

AD&D was a game where each and every DM had his or her own idea of how things were supposed to work, and so did each and every game designer. That was part of its charm, really; it was crazy and fun and idiosyncratic, and its very incoherence justified, nay, mandated bashing it into whatever strange beast your evil little DM heart desired. There was no "This is how it's supposed to be" lurking in the back of your head or coming out of your players' mouths*. But it made a hash of the very idea of balance.

[size=-2]*Well, okay, sometimes it did come out of the players' mouths, but it was easier to scoff at them.[/size]

 

[S'mon]

This is exactly what I mean when I say 1E didn't have a baseline.

OK... but I was just talking about my experience of how much combat there is in a session. You can certainly say "There is no baseline for the amount of combat in a 1e session" and I wouldn't disagree. I would think that for 1st level PCs to be spending 80%+ of every session in combat would have to have been an outlier, though. Without tweaking the system, 1e and 2e 1st level PCs were just not that robust.

I can recall one session that was maybe 80% combat. I ran a twinked out solo 5th level Half-Ogre PC through "Against the Cult of the Reptile God", which is designed for 1st level PCs, and he merrily trashed everything in sight.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Well, what do people mean by baseline? This is a concept I've never heard of before for RPGs.

 

[Beginning of the End]

They were always so easy that it wasn't worth our time to roll for initiative. It was likely the PCs wouldn't take any damage at all

And here we begin to see what the disease of "all encounters should have EL = APL" creates: That encounters are only "interesting" if they statistically ablate party resources according to the expected baseline.

Yeah, in practice it never resembled how the rules described it at all. Which was my main beef with the EL system. An encounter with EL=APL+2 could very in range from extremely easy to impossibly hard.

And here's another common symptom: The expectation that every single encounter will always conform to the statistical average.

This is not only a questionable ideal to hold; it's also fairly irrational and betrays a very poor understanding of what the word "average" means. It's like saying, "The average NFL team scores 17.8 points per game. Ergo, all NFL football games end in ties with both teams having scored 17.8 points." And then getting irate when reality fails to conform to your expectation.

 

[Dausuul]

And here's another common symptom: The expectation that every single encounter will always conform to the statistical average.

This is not only a questionable ideal to hold; it's also fairly irrational and betrays a very poor understanding of what the word "average" means. It's like saying, "The average NFL team scores 17.8 points per game. Ergo, all NFL football games end in ties with both teams having scored 17.8 points." And then getting irate when reality fails to conform to your expectation.

That seems a bit disingenuous. Obviously the luck of the dice, player tactics, and character builds will have an effect on encounter difficulty; but after controlling for those things, an EL 9 encounter should be roughly on par with another EL 9 encounter. If one EL 9 encounter is consistently much harder than another--especially if you can look at the numbers and see that one of them is substantially stronger in every respect--the EL system isn't working right for at least one of them.

Compare a dire wolf to That Damned Crab (scroll down on second link). That's a classic (if extreme) example of the CR system breaking down right there. It's not a statistical artifact, it's That Damned Crab.

 

[Umbran]

Either there is a baseline or there isn't. If people are arguing about it, there probably isn't.

Don't confuse the lack of a clearly stated baseline from the lack of an actual baseline.

Gygax, et al., probably had some pretty solid assumptions of how the game was supposed to run, at least in some ways. But, they were still pretty new at writing books for such a complex game. The problem with being the first to do something is that you make some mistakes - they probably didn't yet fully understand the value of clearly stated assumptions to someone who didn't learn the game from them.

Heck, I think that value was only really recognized fairly recently. 1e, 2e, early White Wolf, and most other games from the 1980s and much of the 1990s lack clear statements of their baselines.

Well, what do people mean by baseline? This is a concept I've never heard of before for RPGs.

There are two different things one might refer to as "baseline".

Baseline assumptions: the basic assumptions about how the play will proceed or be structured.

For example: the rules of 4e are designed with the idea that the basic four roles (defender, striker, leader, controller) will be filled. If you don't have all of them filled, things may go rough for the PCs unless you make allowances.

Baseline performance: How the system behaves if you run it "by the book", using the baseline assumptions.

For example: if you have the basic 4 party, and they go through the assumed number of encounters per session, and you play one session per week, you'll reach level 20 in (on average) some particular number of months of play.