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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Smeelbo" data-source="post: 4739552" data-attributes="member: 81898">Expertise as Power Creep as Marketing, D&D as a Roleplaying GameVery good observation, but balance is difficult in practice. Even in a game like EverQuest, where after enough XP, characters of the same class and level have acquired all the same abilities, balance between classes is elusive. If it is difficult to balance classes, how is character balance even possible? In EverQuest, balance is easier not just because all characters of the same level and class have essentially the same abilities, but there is only one central metric: how well one does in important combat situations (raids, grouping, soloing, etc.). A MMORPG like EverQuest can collect terabytes of combat data, and perform voluminous combat simulations and reach some useful conclusions. But how is balance to be obtained in 4E? How is it measured? It is a much more difficult proposition. While the superficial resemblence to a MMORPG like EverQuest invites similar measures of balance, and those measures are useful, players, encounters, and campaigns very so greatly that reliable comparisons are hard to make. Which brings us back to combat optimization, because combat is ubiquitous, and is subject to strenous analysis. Balance in combat is of necessity the most important balance issue. Other balance issues are far more vague and therefore much more difficult to analyze, if it is possible at all. If we were playing EverQuest, I would agree with 77IM. Because we are playing D&D, I think his criteria is too strong to be fulfilled, except at the cost of minimizing choice (which one could argue 4E does). One important result in game theory is that the best strategies often do not seek the best possible outcome (as 77IM would seek), but rather to avoid the worse outcomes. 4E seeks to avoid the worse outcomes of 3.X by attempting to keep character effectiveness within a narrow band. That is, it seeks to minimize the difference between the best and worst combat ability of character choices. Therefore, the problem with Expertise is that it potentially widens that gap, rather than narrow it. If exactly those characters that needed a boost took the feat, and those whose attacks were already sufficient did not, it would narrow the gap. But if, as is likely, combat-emphasizers take Expertise, but other-emphasizers do not, the gap has widened. So for example, Expertise might better fulfill its apparent intended purpose if it had the requirement (not sure how to best word this) that the character have the appropriate attack stat starting no higher than 16. That would narrow the gap, not widen it.And in practice this can only be achieved by avoiding outcomes that widen the gap. Indeed, this is supposed to be a central design tenet of 4E.He is completely correct. The correct design decision would have been to work the intended effect of Expertise into Errata. Sadly, power creep is a tried and true marketing tool, and Hasbro lacks the discipline to avoid it. Why, when it is in their immediate short term financial interest? Almost no corporations take a long term perspective, and instead are structured in such a way as to reward short term thinking and punish employees who might attempt to act instead in the long term interests of the corporation or its customers. Because of this, 4E will break sooner than we'd like, and in no more than a few years, they will be selling us a "new" edition that fixes problems that they could have avoided in the first place. This new edition will be even more stable than 4E, but absent a change in corporate perspective and the business processes that support that perspective, the next edition will suffer from the same problems as the current edition, it will just take longer to collapse.This would work better at narrowing the gap, but it needs to be worded very carefully, I am not sure how. Otherwise, optimizers will work around the limitation somehow, using one stat to qualify for the feat, but in practice, depend on another stat.Exactly.Yes, roleplaying exists in D&D. Lest we forget, it was the first published roleplaying game. I've been playing D&D for almost 35 years now, and in every campaign I've ever played in, to a greater or lesser degree, D&D alternates roleplay and combat. Most people I've played with over the years identify with their avatars during the game. They act them out. They interact with the non-player characters, pursue goals, conflict with other characters' goals, enjoy triumph, and suffer defeat. The mechanics of the game really have almost nothing to do with whether roleplaying occurs: it is a choice by the players, and a frequent choice in my experience. When I played EverQuest, mechanically a pure combat game, my friends and I roleplayed: we identified with our characters, developed distinct personalities for our characters, and relationships, guilds, even in-game marriages. Compared to many other roleplaying games, D&D is very combat heavy. Big deal. That doesn't stop me from trying to pursue character goals beyond levelling and acquiring stuff. Admittedly, D&D is not Burning Wheel, or Spirit of the Century, but even those games have significant combat rules. The fact that D&D emphasizes combat is not because D&D is only a combat game, but given the stakes in combat, which is fun, we, as players, want clear and fair rules to adjudicate those combats. It is much easier to trust that the game master adjudicates the non-combat portion of the game fairly, that the non-player characters act consistantly and the world behaves in a way that we can have rational expectations and act on those, but in combat, if the DM kills my character, it better damn well be fair. D&D has extensive combat rules because by and large it is the most important game domain to define unambiguosly, and, by and large, it is one of the only game domains that can be usefully defined unambiguously. The same is true to a lesser extent to almost all other published roleplaying games. While it is true that several other games better support mechanically non-combat conflict, Dungeons and Dragons remains, for almost all the players I know, and all the players I enjoy playing with most, a role-playing game. 4E's biggest flaw in that regard is that the skill challenge system is broken, and does not support fair adjudication of non-combat conflicts. Most other RPGS are much better in that regard. In the end, the emphasis on combat matters little to roleplaying. Give players avatars they can identify with and customize, and a world they can interact with, and many, if not most, will roleplay.On the contrary, there are several RPGs that excel at exactly this. Check out Burning Wheel, or its latest incarnation, Mouseguard. As the author says, "It's not what you fight, it's what you fight for." In Burning Wheel, if you don't roleplay interestingly, your character will not only advance more slowly and not as far, but will perform more poorly in combat. Likewise, Spirit of the Century is driven by character and story elements, and again, a poor roleplayer would suffer in combat because they would not receive rewards for playing to their character. The element that 4E is missing is not rules for supporting roleplaying, but rather a good set of rules for resolving non-combat conflicts. The skill challenge system is barely a mechanic, and a broken one at that. Many other systems give much better mechanics for resolve conflicts outside of combat, and many other RPGs put character conflict and roleplaying at the center of the game, rather than just combat. As for me, I will continue to play Expertise as written, and see what actually happens in play. Smeelbo</blockquote>

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