Tony Vargas
Legend
...there /is/ a laugh button.
So I ran a 6-8 encounter day...
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Yes, but I think you missed my point. Actually, both of my points.
POINT the FIRST: This addresses that last paragraph. How the GM runs the game is an incomparable tool for balance. That does not invalidate that the mechanics can also be a force for balance. Okay, what this means is: I agree with you the GM planning is great. We're on the same page. You can stop saying it. Please stop saying it because I have attempted to make abundantly clear that while I agree with that, you keep saying it as a rebuttal to improving balance-within-the-rules which it is not.
It's like saying the driver of a vehicle is the most important part of safety - while true it does not mean that all vehicles are equally safe and you should not attempt to improve them as well.
POINT the SECOND: As already addressed, you can trend in the right direction, especially correcting big, common points that show up in many games. No matter if you are fighting undead or giants or have casters, that one character who is otherwised balance but has a weapon that does d100 damage every time without drawback CAN be better balanced within the rules with a weapon more in line.
I think here you are making the classic blunder that assuming because everyone pulled either share and contributed in their own way, that everyone did the same thing. That's never been true in any version of D&D.
And, it also makes the claim of perfect balance - "balanced across all the potentislal chalkenges" <sic>. You already responded to the message where I wrote that perfect balance doesn't exist, that each table has it's own balance. Don't try to re-frame what I am saying to some absurd idea that mechanics alone can bring perfect balance to everyone.
But mechanics can trend in the right direction. Often by fixing things that are shown to trend in the wrong direction in wide play.
Last edited:
Blue...
Saying "they contributed equally" and "they did the same thing" are not synonymous. So, no, i did not go down that route.
But, the point is that if the balance is isolated from challenge choices "outside mechanics" that the gm makes and "it works" (no assumption of perfection" than that is moving to divorcing those choices "fighter vs wizard", "wizard vs sorc" and the ones made in play from contribution challenge by challenge - aka sameness (not in the description but in result)
It should IMO be that balance means that sometimes the fireball sorc outperforms the controller sorc and vice versa. That makes those choices relevant and distinct, not just HERO system like FX.
In order for that to work tho, a GM has to plan for those use cases and more to show up as well as a host of others.
I get that of course within that paradigm of balance, there can still be imbalances but when the imbalance is linked to something literally as fluid as "pacing" or "rest per encounter by type ratio" its a huge stretch to point to the scale of differences 5e gives that one aspect and highlight it as poor or that any given one "degree" is more balanced or less balanced or less limiting.
The 5e difference in 3-5 vs 6-8 vs 9-12 is not d10 dmg vs d100 dmg. Its not close to the top half of "imbalances a gm choice can insert" in routine play.
Do you have an objectively demonstrable better pacing vs character balance system other than removing a whole lot of differences between characters?
I mean, seems to me if one spellcaster can take a rest and prepare spells suited to the task but another has a small known list then pacing choices by GM as to whether the rest is possible after seeing info that makes it worthwhile is huge balance-wise.
That is not short rest vs long rest, not rests per encounter but is still huge difference in power chosen by gm setup towards pacing.
Does that mean its "shifted to the good" and preferable if we drop one of those caster types and only have preppers or listers but not both cuz having both ties pacing to balance and limits the GM?
Or is that ok cuz we know a gm can and should vary between the pacings so each shines at different times?
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
This is coming from you, it is not what I am saying. Balance does not mean everyone is the same. Balance means everyone contributes (and shines) equally. And not over something so granular as an encounter or a session, but over time everyone gets equal spotlight.
An example of equal but different actions in a single round of one encounter. A sorcerer blasting hordes of henchmen while the cleric heals the unconscious fighter, the wizard casts fly on the paladin so he can engage the wyvern and the ranger sniping spellcasters in the back row. All doing very different things, but all contributing.
None of my examples have been making the characters the same. None of my examples have been trying to ensure equal utility on something so granular as an individual encounter. Of course there are variations. If someone wants a "I press cast this, do that, then repeat this until I win" I'd suggest they play video games. Every adventure should be chock full of things to stretch the players in different ways, and make them work to figure out how they can best make their character contribute.
My examples were about finding egregious places where things don't work well and fix them. And the specific one at the start of this conversation was that classes who center around performing their role using different resource recovery models are impacted differently by changes in number of combats per day, especially when you get down to 1-2 per day.
Since this isn't really my position that you're arguing against, I am going to skip most and jump down to address the last bit of it now:
To reiterate: I never suggested removing differences between characters to address pacing.
The only solutions I talked about were the ones from Adventures in Middle Earth, which is based on 5e but reducing the frequency of a long rest (similar to the variant rules in the DMG but based on the narrative of finding a Sanctuary like Elrond's) and 13th Age, where in that d20 system they tuned around at-will/encounter/full-heal-up (4 encounters) instead of at-will/short rest/long rest.
Okay, now back to your point in the middle.
Citation needed.
Really, it's one of the endlessly recurring topics on ENworld. Behind GWM/SS feats, and probably behind multiclassing. But other then that it's a serious repeat topic. I'd say from that sample that it is something that is a recurring mechanical problem to a wide swath of DMs.
And I did explicitly call out the recovery mechanics as a "d20 weapon, not the d100" - in other words still out of whack enough that adjustments will help the general trend toward balance, but not as egregious as some problems. It just happens to be the one we started talking about here.
That puts you in a hard place of trying to prove a negative if you want to effectively debate that, but really - it comes up again and again from different posters. Sometimes directly, and sometimes in posts that start with "My party faced a Deadly+ and it was a cakewalk" and then dive down into it. That repeated reoccurance seems to indicate that it is a problem that a lot of DMs are having.
Last edited:
Tony Vargas
Legend
A more cogent rebuttal to improving balance-within-the-rules is that we're talking about D&D, and improving balance (especially class balance) by fixing the rules is not remotely on the table. When it was put on the table, the table was smashed to pieces.
As a thought experiment, sure. But, what if, to extend it and make it more analogous to the game in question, that d100 weapon were so utterly iconic that there was no chance of ever removing it from the game or reduce it's damage. Say, if, just last decade, they'd come out with a version that was only d12, while most other weapons were upgraded to d10? And people rejected it so violently that they immediately upgraded it to d20, which still wasn't enough, and cost the game it's dominance, and looked like it might almost have destroyed it completely?
Is it still an easy fix to just get rid of that d100 weapon? No.
Mainly because, in most versions of D&D, contributions were never that even, since balance was pretty terrible.
(Upthread I did flippantly throw out a hypothetical balance scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being 'adequate' and 1 being 'unplayable.'
I was a little unfair to D&D in saying that it didn't even aspire to 1, it's solidly 1, might even be rounded up to 2 - and an excellent DM can shoot it all the way up to 4.
So I'm sorry about dissing D&D like that.)
Making perfect the implacable mortal enemy of not-quite-as-bad, is a common theme in balance discussions, yes.
That was an actual point of the 1 (unplayable) to 10 (adequate) scale of balance I proposed. I wanted to get across the idea that 'perfect' balance is not a goal.
Spotlight balance is certainly thing, but hardly the best result balanced mechanics can hope to manage.
Spotlight balance is really even arguably a misnomer: it's more a way of managing imbalance to make it less obviously unfair, than it is a form of balance, however precarious. It's like a processed, hydrogenated, balance-substitute product.
Yeah, I can see how unconsciousness is equal to blasting hordes of henchmen.
;|
But, yeah, no plausible D&D example is going to be a really /good/ example of balance.
Undeniably true, of course. The impact of the 5MWD is well-known, and can be shown objectively, even with simple math (I suppose a formal proof might even be possible - that would be an amusing waste of time for someone with a lot more math-nerd cred than myself).
13A's essentially encounter pacing - the equivalent of a short rest after every encounter; the equivalent of a long after every 4th encounter - does a fair job of masking the innate imbalance of classes arbitrarily differentiated by resource mix.
Certainly not the only solutions, but a lot more plausible to introduce into 5e than more effective/robust mechanical ones (again, see what happens to D&D, historically, when you try to reduce imbalance, mechanically, in the design, rather than just mitigate it at the table).
As neat as the 13A trick is, and as inadequate as the 5e option of just changing rest times as a campaign variant seems to me, I like something closer to what the AiME solution sounds like (can't say I've checked it out).
That is, allowing rests based on the story & the situation - just taking all that DM Empowerment that is such a feature of 5e, and using it unreservedly to enforce the needed pacing at the mechanical level, without (much) impacting the story level. You make mechanical 'rest' and thus pacing, a slave to the narrative, rather than slaving the pacing of the story to the imperative of mechanically-defined short/long rests coming in a prescribed average ratio to eachother & encounters.
Last edited:
Amazing...
"This is coming from you, it is not what I am saying. Balance does not mean everyone is the same. Balance means everyone contributes (and shines) equally. And not over something so granular as an encounter or a session, but over time everyone gets equal spotlight. "
So, how is this accepted balance different from pacing variability that does the same? how is it something out of bounds "limiting" for a Gm to mix up pacing challenges (some long days episodes which spotlight the fighters etc and some short days episodes which spotlight the wizards and a mix in between) so that the impact of pacing provides just another way to move the spotlight back and forth?
Why would the pacing one be seen as limiting so much it needs changing or shows a flaw in the system when the types of monsters and that kind of mixes have as much or more impact if GM attention is not paid to it?
lets put it another way...
Say another game makes a long rest with similar benefits occur every sixth episode as a hard coded part of the rules.
Say it gives a short rest after every other episode.
episode may = encounter or scene or day or whatever but not gonna try and define some other hypothetical game's time keeping nomenclature that closely just for the example.
That seems to put the "pacing impact on recovery" solid in the rules - a strict mechanical thing.
Now, it seems to me that as a DnD 5e Gm if that is the pace i want and i want it to be universal locked down, i can do that. i can script that "possibility" into my general campaign structure. After a while the players will figure it out (like they would in the other game) and be able to bank on it.
It also seems to fit pretty well within the DnD 5e standards - at least close enough for no major imbalances.
But, if i am a DND 5e gm who doesn't want that, i can have it mix and match and vary and sometimes longer days and sometimes shorter days and sometimes known which it is and sometimes not known which it is and... by mixing and matching these i can spotlight some character sometimes and other characters other times using "pacing and time pressure" just like i can with dozens of other choices.
Which of those do you consider to be more limiting on the GM?
is every two = short and every six = long locked in by rule more or less limiting on the Gm than the DND 5e version is?
......
The reason i keep coming back to asking you about encounter equality is that if one accepts that its ok to balance over a longer series of time, then pacing as it works in dnd does not limit the gm. they can run long days or short days and medium days and mix them in back and forth to spotlight these here and those there and get that "pacing impact on balance" to balance out over time - just like lots of other choices the GM makes which are even bigger.
So, it makes no sense to see the Gm needing to mix and match pacing over time based on his characters for its spotlight benefits as limiting or bad if one already accepts that the Gm will be doing that in lotsa other ways anyway. At least to me.
''''
Finally, frequency of recurring topics on boards is not a good reference for how big a problem is. never has been. never will. there are a lot of reasons that govern the frenzy rate of specific sub-topics in a small subset of participants.
But hey, folks can draw on whatever they want for their opinions.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
I think it is problematic if you habe to go through a certain numbers of encounters to benefit from a short or long rest. That means you as a player have less choices. I actually did like the 4e milestone action point. That was a powerful tool to encourage to press on.
I could imagine some form of that. I could also imagine something like the round die or whatever it is called in 13 age.
After the first encounter you put a die in the middle starting at 1. You add that number to each d20 roll. A short rest sets it back by 1. A long rest resets it to zero.
I could imagine some form of that. I could also imagine something like the round die or whatever it is called in 13 age.
After the first encounter you put a die in the middle starting at 1. You add that number to each d20 roll. A short rest sets it back by 1. A long rest resets it to zero.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
It's not - as long as the DM favors both shorter and longer.
So that means that as long as a DM runs the same above the 6-8 encounter limit as below it - 13 encounters (+6 over average) as they do 1 encounter days (-6 under average), as many 10 encounter days as 4 encounter days, it's all good.
However, if I'f heard once about DMs that regularly go as much over than under I'd be surprised.
In other words, that is one perfectly valid mechanical solution that tables are not doing regularly for whatever reasons they have.
Ah, but "short days" + "medium days" isn't a balance. Short days favor long-rest recover characters, while medium days are at the design tested place and are more neutral. It would be "short days" + "long days" (+ any amount of "medium days").
And since tables do not seem to have regular adoption of "long days" (significantly > that 6-8), that's why there is a problem.
Thank you for providing such a great example of the issue, and since it is your own example I hope that you pay attention to it.
Let's see, using what tools I do have - frequenent feedback on ENworld - is less a view of all DMs then your thoughts without any backing form anyone else.
Sorry, that doesn't fly. I will gladly consider your point that it isn't widespread if you provide some sort of evidence at a greater level. If you don't have that or have never seen it, perhaps you should consider that you are only talking for your table and that this might be widespread.
Larnievc
Hero
That’s exactly what I do. And a long rest is 1 hour. The encounters are always non trivial where they need to be on their toes. I’m not a fan of attrition encounters.
"Ah, but "short days" + "medium days" isn't a balance. Short days favor long-rest recover characters, while medium days are at the design tested place and are more neutral. It would be "short days" + "long days" (+ any amount of "medium days")."
Sorry if i was unclear. When i used and and or rather inelegantly i was referring to mixing long, short and medium not only all long or only short and medium. I can see why it would be helpful to read it that way tho, given your choices. i will try and bullet proof my responses a bit more in the future... or not.
