Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Smeelbo" data-source="post: 4729119" data-attributes="member: 81898">Does the teir gap actually even exist?There are several disincentives against playtesting.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Good playtesting requires adherence to a design methodology.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This in turn requires skilled and disciplined management.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Once a lax development culture is in place, it is in the participants' self interest to maintain the status quo.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Broken powers and combinations have a measurable positive effect on revenue.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Decades of subpar software development practices have lowered end user/customer expectations to the point where failure to meet design criteria is normal.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Because of these lowered expectations, improved quality does not yield increased revenue.</li> </ul>So most developers, whether pen and paper or software do the minimal possible testing, as having better processes increases up front costs, and has a negative impact on revenues. Unless the number of broken combinations rises above a certain threshold, it is better to errata after the revenue has been booked, than to catch that combination in advance. "The fix is in the mail." Back to the original subject, after DMing the PHB2 WW Game Day Adventure, I am less convinced that the supposed tier gap really exists, even prior to Expertise. The main argument against the gap is that as player level rises, tactics are expected to make up the apparent attack deficit. The counter argument is that tactics or synergies are first, roughly constant over level, so effectively the same tactics are available at heroic as at epic, and second, comparable tactics and synergies are available to the monsters, and third, to the extent that more tactics and synergies become available as level rises, they become equally available to both monsters and players. I don't think this is really so. Clearly, higher level characters have more powers, and therefore potentially more tactics and synergies available to them. The number of abilities a character can expect to have available by level is approximately: Level/Abilities (including racial, class, and items)1/86/1511/2616/3321/3826/4230/48 Which is a considerable number of powers for the player to choose from. In constrast, monsters have vastly smaller numbers of available powers, roughly 2-3 powers per tier, at most. Further, while parties are extremely diverse, with no duplicate members and few identical abililities, there are almost always fewer distinct monster types in an encounter than player characters, and parties mostly do not face groups of monsters that greatly outnumber them. So on a given round, the players might have approximately between 10 to 50 options per character, or between 10^5th and 3x10^8th permutations of options, while the monsters have more like between 10 and 3x10^3 permuations of options. It is this power of permutations wherein the great power of the player character arises. Some of those permutations yield very great advantage, and the players have orders of magnitude more options than the monsters. Indeed, I can safely predict that what will break 4E in the not-so-long-run will be ability of players to apply powerful combinations faster than the publisher's ability to errata. The awful gap that arose in 3.X may take somewhat longer to raise its ugly head in 4E, and it may be possible to beat it down longer, but as long as new material is published, the permutive hydra will grow new heads faster than exponentially. Consider the cheesy goodness that is the character optimization forum. They will continue to discover nastier cheese that becomes harder and harder to fix. The power of the group is in the combination of its powers, and not so much to be found in the individual powers themselves. But you still have to hit! Aid another. Expertise seems more and more to me like a weak fix to a problem that never existed in the first place. Smeelbo</blockquote>

Verification