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RPG theory: in-game balancing
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8685748" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I have been playing since about 1980, starting with the old Basic red box. And like you, I stopped at essentially 3.5e and haven't updated to more modern editions. I have 10+ years of experience with both 1e AD&D and 3.X D&D. And in my experience they aren't really all that different in terms of number of player deaths except if played as written at 1st level. Deaths at 1st level in 1e AD&D were really common. We generally killed off half of the characters in a party at 1st level before we adopted the dead at -10 house rule. But after 1st level, the deaths in the 1e to 3e are pretty similar and people with experience in both will generally have similar experiences, especially with that dead at -10 house rule that became the official rules in 3e.</p><p></p><p>In both systems, the 3rd or 4th successful sword blow will probably kill your character. That's true if you are being attacked by an orc at 3rd level in either system, or if at 10th level the thing swinging the sword is a cloud giant. If anything, rules as written, 3e is much more lethal at 10th level than 1e AD&D was because in 3e all monsters have explicit strength scores that explicitly add to the damage dealt to attacks and all monsters get multiple attacks per round as if they were fighters based on their attack bonus. In both systems, for a party of 4 10th level characters a cloud giant is a reasonable encounter, but the 3e version is beefier, hits harder, and attacks 3 times per round. More subtly, in 1e as you leveled up your saving throws got better and better, so that by 10th level you rarely failed saves. In 3e, your poor saves actually get relatively worse the higher level you get because unlike 1e the difficulty of a saving throw increases with level and generally poor saves didn't keep up with the difficulty inflation. This meant that in 3e the chance that you failed a save was getting more likely just about the time that you'd regularly start encountering save or die effects. And in both systems, by the time you are 10th level it's less the things that attack hit points that are the problem, as it the things that bypass hit points are what is likely to kill you.</p><p></p><p>But even then, 3e is still more lethal than RAW 1e AD&D because 3e converted the common house rules on critical hits to standard RAW. And critical hits vastly favor monsters over PCs because PCs over the long haul face more critical hits than monsters do. PCs are expected to survive. Monsters aren't. So random bad luck is worse for PCs than monsters. In 3e, if that orc or cloud giant critically hits you with a great axe you can easily go from max hit points to dead in just one blow. An orc doing 3d12+9 damage (avg. 27) to a 3rd level character is probably death, and to a first level character it is definitely death. The same thing is true of a cloud giant doing (12d6+54) 118 damage in one hit to a 10th level character.</p><p></p><p>In practice however, how lethal any of these systems are depends very much on the style of the DM and the processes of play in use. You can run either system as brutal as you like, or you can in either system carry on lengthy narratives with the same characters over years of real life time. All you have to do is adjust things like starting attributes, treasure, challenge and house rules to create the experience of play you want to have. And every single 1e table was playing with significant house rules whether they new it or not.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't think the vast majority of people believe that PC death is bad because of bias. They believe PC death is bad because it runs contrary to the the goals of their play. I think you are quite right to focus here on the fundamental question, "Why do you play?" or to put it another way, "What makes the game fun for you?"</p><p></p><p>There are several different frameworks that theorists have constructed for describing what makes the game fun for a player. But in all of those frameworks, the majority of players have goals that run contrary to their PCs dying. It's pretty easy to understand why at both a practical and theoretical level. At a theoretical level if you were trying to tell a story about that character, the vast majority of times that the character dies it makes a bad story. Or conversely, if you didn't care about story but you did care about overcoming challenges and winning, then your character dying represents your failure. On a more practical level, if you played the character any length of time the character has become a valuable sentimental possession which you have formed an attachment to and created with significant labor. The death of that character in the sense of actual loss of the character (and not merely a quick and meaningless resurrection) represents a deep and real emotional loss. That's not a bias on the players part. If you've guided a character up to 10th level and you loss that character permanently, then that is really painful. If it was a 'good death' it might be a bitter sweet sort of pain, but it still hurts. And that's true of pretty much any game or system, even if we are playing something like Pendragon or Call of Cthulhu where character death is expected as part of the game play.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8685748, member: 4937"] I have been playing since about 1980, starting with the old Basic red box. And like you, I stopped at essentially 3.5e and haven't updated to more modern editions. I have 10+ years of experience with both 1e AD&D and 3.X D&D. And in my experience they aren't really all that different in terms of number of player deaths except if played as written at 1st level. Deaths at 1st level in 1e AD&D were really common. We generally killed off half of the characters in a party at 1st level before we adopted the dead at -10 house rule. But after 1st level, the deaths in the 1e to 3e are pretty similar and people with experience in both will generally have similar experiences, especially with that dead at -10 house rule that became the official rules in 3e. In both systems, the 3rd or 4th successful sword blow will probably kill your character. That's true if you are being attacked by an orc at 3rd level in either system, or if at 10th level the thing swinging the sword is a cloud giant. If anything, rules as written, 3e is much more lethal at 10th level than 1e AD&D was because in 3e all monsters have explicit strength scores that explicitly add to the damage dealt to attacks and all monsters get multiple attacks per round as if they were fighters based on their attack bonus. In both systems, for a party of 4 10th level characters a cloud giant is a reasonable encounter, but the 3e version is beefier, hits harder, and attacks 3 times per round. More subtly, in 1e as you leveled up your saving throws got better and better, so that by 10th level you rarely failed saves. In 3e, your poor saves actually get relatively worse the higher level you get because unlike 1e the difficulty of a saving throw increases with level and generally poor saves didn't keep up with the difficulty inflation. This meant that in 3e the chance that you failed a save was getting more likely just about the time that you'd regularly start encountering save or die effects. And in both systems, by the time you are 10th level it's less the things that attack hit points that are the problem, as it the things that bypass hit points are what is likely to kill you. But even then, 3e is still more lethal than RAW 1e AD&D because 3e converted the common house rules on critical hits to standard RAW. And critical hits vastly favor monsters over PCs because PCs over the long haul face more critical hits than monsters do. PCs are expected to survive. Monsters aren't. So random bad luck is worse for PCs than monsters. In 3e, if that orc or cloud giant critically hits you with a great axe you can easily go from max hit points to dead in just one blow. An orc doing 3d12+9 damage (avg. 27) to a 3rd level character is probably death, and to a first level character it is definitely death. The same thing is true of a cloud giant doing (12d6+54) 118 damage in one hit to a 10th level character. In practice however, how lethal any of these systems are depends very much on the style of the DM and the processes of play in use. You can run either system as brutal as you like, or you can in either system carry on lengthy narratives with the same characters over years of real life time. All you have to do is adjust things like starting attributes, treasure, challenge and house rules to create the experience of play you want to have. And every single 1e table was playing with significant house rules whether they new it or not. I don't think the vast majority of people believe that PC death is bad because of bias. They believe PC death is bad because it runs contrary to the the goals of their play. I think you are quite right to focus here on the fundamental question, "Why do you play?" or to put it another way, "What makes the game fun for you?" There are several different frameworks that theorists have constructed for describing what makes the game fun for a player. But in all of those frameworks, the majority of players have goals that run contrary to their PCs dying. It's pretty easy to understand why at both a practical and theoretical level. At a theoretical level if you were trying to tell a story about that character, the vast majority of times that the character dies it makes a bad story. Or conversely, if you didn't care about story but you did care about overcoming challenges and winning, then your character dying represents your failure. On a more practical level, if you played the character any length of time the character has become a valuable sentimental possession which you have formed an attachment to and created with significant labor. The death of that character in the sense of actual loss of the character (and not merely a quick and meaningless resurrection) represents a deep and real emotional loss. That's not a bias on the players part. If you've guided a character up to 10th level and you loss that character permanently, then that is really painful. If it was a 'good death' it might be a bitter sweet sort of pain, but it still hurts. And that's true of pretty much any game or system, even if we are playing something like Pendragon or Call of Cthulhu where character death is expected as part of the game play. [/QUOTE]
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