Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ycore Rixle" data-source="post: 591171" data-attributes="member: 675">I think video/computer games and PnP rpgs have had huge influences on each other.The most intriguing influence, to me, is the issue of balance.  Go back twenty or twenty-five years, and balance as we know it today was not a big issue.  On p. 25 of the 1e PHB, Gary Gygax says, "Thus, while magic-users are not strong in combat with weapons, they are possibly the most fearsome of all charcater classes when high levels of ability are finally attained."  And on p. 30, Gary writes, "The monk is the most unusual of all characters, the hardest to qualify for, and perhaps, the most deadly."  And he was right - high-level magic-users and high-level monks owned other classes in 1e.  Today, if any designer even  hinted that one class might be "the most fearsome" or "the most deadly," he would be ridiculed for being so stupid as to make one possible character choice more powerful than another.I think that is due to the influence of computer/video games.  In a computer rpg, the programmer isn't there as the player plays, and he can't make real-time adjustments to keep the game interesting for the player.  So the programmer has to make all character choices equally powerful against the game's challenges from the start, so that the player can legitimately choose how to play and be entertained no matter what.  In a PnP rpg, there is less need for this 'balance,' because the DM is there to make things interesting for the player no matter what character he chooses.  In a subtle but very real way, unbalancing the classes gives the player a lot of power over the world.  If the player chooses a lower-powered class, the DM, to make things interesting for the player, will be obliged to send up lower-powered monsters against the character.Which is not to say that unbalancing the classes is necessarily the right way to go.  There is a lot of good from balancing the classes too - for one, it gives people a great topic to debate: "Is X broken?  Is Y overpowered?" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Also, it makes it easier for everyone to find a role in a mixed group, it makes people feel more secure that they won't regret their class decision or get 'power envy' later on, and it does a host of other good things.  I just think it's interesting how everyone talks about balance now, and it really wasn't such a huge issue back in the day.  I think computer games are what helped make it an issue.</blockquote>

Verification