D&D General On Powerful Classes, 1e, and why the Original Gygaxian Gatekeeping Failed

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure. As you say, some of Garry’s attempts at balance were more successful than others.

Right, you’re thinking of “balance” on an individual-to-individual basis. A Holy Avenger is more powerful than a normal sword, so they’re not “balanced against each other.” I’m talking about balance across the broader playing field. A Holy Avenger is able to be as powerful as it is and still feel “fair” because it’s extremely rare. If everyone could get one as easily as they can get a normal sword, normal swords would feel pointless. But, because normal swords are easily accessible and Holy Avengers are not, they each have a purpose and a role. The power is “balanced out” by the rarity, making for a fair overall gameplay experience.

My comparison to Magic: the Gathering was very intentional. Magic is a game where rarity as a form of balance is integral to the game’s design. Nobody is going to make the argument that a powerful rare card like Jace the Mindsculptor isn’t way stronger than a common card like Youthful Knight. But, in an environment where card availability is limited, the rarity of the former balances its relative power. Commons, though typically weaker than rarer cards, are more important in limited, because they form the majority of the card pool, and are the basis on which you’ll be building a deck. A rare bomb can be useful, but if you try and build around it, you’re likely to end up with a much weaker deck than one built from a solid base of commons.

Of course, this form of balance fails when access to the rarer cards isn’t actually limited. Richard Garfield severely under-estimated the amount of product the average player would open, and realized that in the long-term, rarity wouldn’t serve to balance the more powerful cards like he thought it would, because people would just buy enough packs to get whatever cards they wanted regardless of rarity (which is why limited formats were invented).

Likewise in D&D, players just re-roll until they get the stats they want, or use more generous stat-generation methods, or “cheat” or otherwise manipulate the intended probability distribution so they can play what they want to play. This undermines the balance factor I believe stat requirements were supposed to create, making the powerful classes, bonuses, and other advantages of high stats more accessible than they were intended to be. Which is pretty much your thesis. I think we’re ultimately in agreement here but quibbling over terminology.

Well, just as D&D has evolved, so has M:tG. Back when I started playing, at the beginning of the game, you got as many Black Lotuses as you possibly could and filled your deck with them. They were flat out better in every respect than virtually every other card, except a couple others you had to have to do something with all the mana (so, maybe if you had 20 Black Lotuses they might start to be worse if you added more, but still). NOWADAYS an M:tG deck is often built with maybe just a couple rare cards in it, maybe none at all, and they are usually there more to act as 'resets' or 'jokers', a card that can pop up and turn a losing position into a win. Your basic deck strategy is formed from commons and uncommons synergistically reducing your opponent's options by the equivalent of an arm-lock. Even in the old days there builds like that, 'goblin decks' that just swarmed the opponent with many cheap common creatures faster than he could stomp on them.

Nowadays, 4e or 5e, you can simply play whatever you want. You get a set of scores to distribute, which just basically gives you a strength and a weakness you can pick, and then you play a class fit to your strength. If the players really want to be "the awesome band of Rangers" and all play the same class, they darn well can. But that does mean the game is very different. Gary's idea of the game was a whole community of players and their characters doing different things in the campaign, forming parties as needed. If paladins were really rare, then having one in your party was rare. Yeah, that PC was inherently strong, but it was just one of many, next week you were the wimpy thief. If you play today's sort of game with 1e, then one guy is stuck forever as the thief, and the other guy gets to be the rocking paladin every single game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In reaction to the Holy Avenger part alone, this too was part of Gary's presumed balancing apparatus re the give-n-take going on with the Paladin, i.e., his limit on alignment, followers, monies, et al. So yes in the "broader" aspect I agree. It's all, in EGG's perspective, a series of +1/-1 to get to "0"= balance.

Yeah, so one might suspect, and you might know, that the details of the exact benefits and limitations of the various classes/races might actually reflect the SPECIFIC SITUATION in Gary's original campaign. As in, literally, "Oh, the Paladin seems like he's a bit anemic here, everyone else has a big army, but he can't really have that, but now its important. I know, I'LL GIVEN HIM THIS STUPID AWESOME SWORD!" Of course every game is unique, so nobody who didn't play that exact game would ever even know WHY X was balanced against Y. The rest of us just scratch our heads and wonder.

 

[Voadam]

Did D&D have any predecssors other than D&D to learn from?

There was Chainmail

1e had a few years of experience with its predecessor OD&D to learn from.

I could not say off the top of my head what else came out before 1e. Based off the 1e DMG Boot Hill, Gamma World, and Metamorphosis Alpha from TSR. I don't know the exact timeline of Traveller, Runequest, or others.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Yeah, so one might suspect, and you might know, that the details of the exact benefits and limitations of the various classes/races might actually reflect the SPECIFIC SITUATION in Gary's original campaign. As in, literally, "Oh, the Paladin seems like he's a bit anemic here, everyone else has a big army, but he can't really have that, but now its important. I know, I'LL GIVEN HIM THIS STUPID AWESOME SWORD!" Of course every game is unique, so nobody who didn't play that exact game would ever even know WHY X was balanced against Y. The rest of us just scratch our heads and wonder.

Well yes. I have the knowledge because I was his co-DM and co-designer. But all of it was dependent on his initial choice of "progression" and how that literally colors everything that comes thereafter, some good, some not so good. And how else would we have playtested something yet unpublished but in our campaign? Kinda like the engineer who drove the first Ford after designing it.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

There was Chainmail

1e had a few years of experience with its predecessor OD&D to learn from.

I could not say off the top of my head what else came out before 1e. Based off the 1e DMG Boot Hill, Gamma World, and Metamorphosis Alpha from TSR. I don't know the exact timeline of Traveller, Runequest, or others.

... and Warriors of Mars. And in 1975 we had a proper example of world building from MAR Barker, Empire of the Petal Throne.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I all of these so called "balance" mechanics, which are mostly just "rich get richer" mechanics. So the guy who rolled better in creation, in addition to having better stats impacting all their rolls, gets to ALSO have the better class, AND advance faster? Also... boy, do I want to come for a game every session where my character gets less and less relevant! Or put in the drudge work hoping to dominate the later end of the campaign only for the game to fall apart.

What a fun way to spend hundreds of hours of my time!

Only time I have ever seen it done well was in Ars Magica, where everyone played a "real" character (wizard) AND several wand caddies.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

My comparison to Magic: the Gathering was very intentional. Magic is a game where rarity as a form of balance is integral to the game’s design.

The design to get you to buy more packs?

 

[Charlaquin]

I would like to note here the reality of TROUPE PLAY which was practiced in, at least Gary's, early campaigns. That is, the game was designed such that players would develop a number of characters and play different ones at different times. You were bound to get some 'good ones', and it was normal practice to A) use these character sheets for NPC henchmen (IE you rolled up a really nice wizard with an 18 INT, but you're playing your 6th level fighter now, so you hire a wizard, guess what sheet you use). and then B) henchmen could be promoted to being PCs. This was pretty close to a 'rule', at least of campaign management. So in a LOT of cases when you needed another PC, you already had some good stat blocks lying around to use, and they had some experience, etc. Technically your wizard PC might be the henchman of your fighter PC "out on sabbatical" and next week he's an NPC again, but that was perfectly fine. At some point the relationship might change, or the fighter might get ganked and maybe the wizard even gets some of his stuff, or inherits some of his employees.

The point being, you might well roll a lot of characters up, and even if you weren't allowed to toss the ones you didn't like, you could just make them less significant hirelings or whatnot, and you could build up the 'good ones' before you even really played them, and keep them 'on deck'.

Right, so this context is actually specifically what makes me think rarity was being used as a balance tool. If you just make one character and play it consistently until it dies, having high stat requirements to play the best classes is actually extremely unbalanced. Maybe one person gets lucky (or cheats) and gets a character with advantages on top of advantages and everyone else just kinda has to suck it up. In troupe play, where you’re rolling up lots of characters and might control different characters from session to session, or might have characters acting as henchmen for other characters, rarity actually works as a balancing factor. When you got lucky enough to roll stats eligible for a Paladin, that was, theoretically, THE one Paladin in your stable of characters. And if they died, that was it. That was not a risk you were going to take lightly. No, the lower-stat Fighters would be the ones you’d want to send on the more dangerous missions.

In a way, troupe play is the Limited of D&D. The context that more closely resembles the way the designer originally envisioned the game being played, that makes a lot of design decisions make way more sense.

 

[Charlaquin]

The design to get you to buy more packs?

That’s how the design has been leveraged, but it wasn’t actually Richard Garfield’s intent. He assumed the average player would spend a certain amount on packs and play with whatever they had, and he used rarity as a balance tool based on that assumption. He didn’t anticipate people spending huge amounts of money on the game “chasing” particular cards they “needed” for a deck. That’s also why the game originally had 40 card decks with no limit on the number of copies of any individual card. He just genuinely didn’t expect people to buy pack after pack so they could get 20 plague rats and 20 black lotuses.

He made a similar mistake with Keyforge - another card game he designed where each deck is generated randomly and can’t be modified (a design choice made specifically to address the ineffectiveness of rarity as a balancing tool in TCGs). He didn’t think people would buy large numbers of decks at MSRP and sell the best ones at huge markups. Richard is a great mathematician but he seems to have a very poor understanding of player psychology.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

That’s how the design has been leveraged, but it wasn’t actually Richard Garfield’s intent. He assumed the average player would spend a certain amount on packs and play with whatever they had, and he used rarity as a balance tool based on that assumption. He didn’t anticipate people spending huge amounts of money on the game “chasing” particular cards they “needed” for a deck. That’s also why the game originally had 40 card decks with no limit on the number of copies of any individual card. He just genuinely didn’t expect people to buy pack after pack so they could get 20 plague rats and 20 black lotuses.

He made a similar mistake with Keyforge - another card game he designed where each deck is generated randomly and can’t be modified (a design choice made specifically to address the ineffectiveness of rarity as a balancing tool in TCGs). He didn’t think people would buy large numbers of decks at MSRP and sell the best ones at huge markups. Richard is a great mathematician but he seems to have a very poor understanding of player psychology.

That's still a terrible balance mechanic, if it even can be called such a thing. Rare cards weren't even remotely equal. I mean... Arabian Nights had a MOUNTAIN as a rare card.

By that logic, a card that automatically let you win not only the game, but the entire opponent's deck, would be balanced, because it was rare.