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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8312997" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Good post.Personally, when I talk about D&D balance, I'm exclusively talking about it from a GMing perspective (which is all I do and all I've ever done). Specifically, these are my concerns:* When I throw together a combat, my expectations are that the results will be predictable within certain bounds to me.  I expect my mental model for the dynamics of the combat and the zoomed-out results of combat to be predictable.  If I set up a combat that involves dangerous Artillery Minions who are protected by Terrain Features and Soldiers/Brutes, I expect tactically solving this puzzle to be a thing.  If a Solo Leader/Controller interacts with them in ways that punish Team PC, but that Solo also punishes Team PC for engaging them, I expect tactically solving this puzzle to be a thing.  If I put features of the combat the incentivize engagement (movement, stunting, protecting NPCs, getting to this area here to do this thing), I expect that to be a thing.  If I create a deadly combat, I expect that to manifest in requisite tension and adrenaline (and not fait accompli).If those things aren't reliably produced (meaning, they aren't predictable to me as the GM)...Houston...we have a problem.* I want noncombat conflicts to be able to be meaningfully nested within the combat such that (a) the action economy required to engage with these goals is somewhere between "not punished" and incentivized (eg if there is a Portal where mooks are spilling out of it...I want Team PC to be able to orient themselves to the decision-point of "do we shut down this portal" and I want that decision to be a tough one and for it to matter).* I will NEVER EVER EVER again spend the cognitive overhead required to tailor play to PC tactical niches or to rotate spotlight or to balance a natively unbalanced engine.  Won't do it.  I'm not going to Arms Race with Spellcasters or impose content upon play so weak PC archetypes can follow my bread-crumbs to Power Fantasy.  Its anathema to skilled play and I want to spend all of my cognitive horsepower on creativity and dynamism...I don't want to spend one cent of it on making up for the system's issues that I have to curate out of existence.  So those are always my chief concerns when I engage on these subjects (and those 3 concerns were what informed my dogged effort to get 5e balanced around the Encounter/Scene rather than the Adventuring Day)</blockquote>

Verification