Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?

[Philotomy Jurament]

I never saw any evidence that wandering monsters were imposed as a limit to exploration and mapping. They were simply an application of "logic" that monsters would not just sit in rooms waiting for adventurers and would instead mill about.

The "logical" explanation for why there are wandering monsters is separate from their game function, which is inherent in the rules for XP, time, and exploration.

The default assumption of the original rules is that your characters are after "fortune and glory," with a big emphasis on the fortune. That's why treasure awards XP: it's an abstract "story award" that fits the assumed paradigm. Under the system of XP awards that became standard (from Supplement I Greyhawk on), PCs could expect around 80% of their XP to come from treasure, and only 20% or so from monsters.

With that kind of setup, fighting wandering monsters has a poor risk:reward ratio. Wandering monsters rarely have any treasure to speak of. They become something to avoid, for game reasons, as well as for story reasons. The threat of wandering monsters encourages players to set a goal and keep it in mind, to avoid wasting time on things like detailed mapping and searching every little inch of the place, et cetera. In that sense, wandering monsters certainly act to limit and focus exploration.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The "logical" explanation for why there are wandering monsters is separate from their game function, which is inherent in the rules for XP, time, and exploration.

The default assumption of the original rules is that your characters are after "fortune and glory," with a big emphasis on the fortune. That's why treasure awards XP: it's an abstract "story award" that fits the assumed paradigm. Under the system of XP awards that became standard (from Supplement I Greyhawk on), PCs could expect around 80% of their XP to come from treasure, and only 20% or so from monsters.

With that kind of setup, fighting wandering monsters has a poor risk:reward ratio. Wandering monsters rarely have any treasure to speak of. They become something to avoid, for game reasons, as well as for story reasons. The threat of wandering monsters encourages players to set a goal and keep it in mind, to avoid wasting time on things like detailed mapping and searching every little inch of the place, et cetera. In that sense, wandering monsters certainly act to limit and focus exploration.

Indeed. The relevant sections can be found on page 103 of the PHB and page 97 of the DMG (1E versions). From both the DM and players perspectives there are warnings and admonitions about wasting time and the effect such activity can have on wandering monster frequency.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Not really. The rules were designed to be balanced, but the game did not succeed very well in this aspect.

AD&D had a pretty narrowly defined "solution": play a fighter or a cleric. If you rolled high enough dice, you can consider playing one of the overpowered sub-classes. Any choice outside of this range would inhibit the party's chances of success. This didn't stop people from playing thieves and magic-users anyway, but these characters were definitely dead weight in most groups.

It's okay. This was the Wild West of tabletop RPG gaming. Later editions corrected the earlier editions' mistakes.

Overpowered how? If your first level characters need a lock picked, the thief is overpowered. If you need a sleep spell, the wizard is. 1e characters were pretty well balanced, I think, just not inside of combat - and they were never meant to be. The game is not primarily about combat, but of the exploration of a world.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

But higher level wizards ruled exploration too with knock/fly etc. I know at what you´re getting at here, but i don´t think that the first few "glass jaw" levels of spellcasters made up for their ever-increasing flexibility, inside AND outside of combat.

I´ve always thought that you could have remedied that with a better approach at utility magic items in AD&D - because of some quirk of magic, ONLY non-spellcasters can use all those not-spellstoring magic items. So, if you find an apparatus of kwalish, only your thief/fighter can use it.

 

[Ariosto]

You can see how I've taken the old convention of the random encounter that happened by chance regardless of player action and turned it into a Skill Challenge that allows players to use their wits and their character's skills to effect the occurance of random encounters.

I have not looked at that Second Edition module in a while. The AD&D1 rules, though, do not stipulate random encounters that happen "regardless of player action". Indeed, the primary purpose of wandering monsters is to discourage certain choices of action -- in general, the choice of wandering without a clear objective, at a snail's pace due to "pixel bitching" each step. (Naturally, there are no wandering monsters in the Tomb of Horrors).

 

[Ariosto]

My own thoughts are that the intended result is the same, the tools we have to get to those results have been improved.

Do you mean the same in 4e as in 3e? I see a transitional phase in 3e, and hardly think that people who prefer it to 4e just don't appreciate "better tools". A fair number of people seem to like 4e who did not like 3e. Just accident? Are the new kids on the block just better designers than Johnathan Tweet, Monte Cook and Skip Williams?

I think it much more straightforward to attribute the suitability of different designs to different purposes as being chiefly ... by design!

The resulting game is so different from, sometimes diametrically the opposite of, what Gygax set forth as his intent, that the claim falls flat. Gygax was quite capable of designing VERY different games; the gulf between Dangerous Journeys/Mythus and Lejendary Adventures demonstrates that well!

Is 4e designed to be humanocentric? You say yes ...

... but in a way that doesn't gimp someone's choice to play another race if they want. A better tool in my opinion to achieve the same idea.

Do you really think that "doesn't gimp someone's choice" applies to class and level limits? Or do you think that halflings deserved the severest limits as "balance" for being so much more "powerful" than elves? Or do you think all that is just accidental, not really "the idea" in the first place? Seriously??!!

If you are unclear on just what "humanocentric" meant, then you can read page 21 in the 1st ed. Dungeon Masters Guide.

 

[Ariosto]

However, the skill challenge system in 4e, as it first appeared, needed a lot of work.

As it appears in the 4e DMG I have, it is to my mind atrocious -- but to my mind it "needs a lot of work" the way a torture device might. I am hardly inclined to fork out more money to find out how it has been "improved".

It was simply bland and meaningless, with the die rolls having no real effect apart from toting up a score.

And now? Is it exciting and meaningless? See, it's not the dice rolls "having no real effect" that concerns me. As a player, I would like to get on with actually playing a game.

 

[Ariosto]

Traps in all editions have done what? Attack your character. Before they were a sub-system, now they have been incorporated into what they always really were. And now you can have more than just a "gotcha!" trap and incorporate more elaborate traps.

Yeah, can't be anything so elaborate in ol' Grimtooth's eh? I mean, never mind the lack of data for a 4e dice-fest -- there are NO game mechanics at all!

But higher level wizards ruled exploration too with knock/fly etc. I know at what you´re getting at here, but i don´t think that the first few "glass jaw" levels of spellcasters made up for their ever-increasing flexibility, inside AND outside of combat.

"Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up." -- a long sentence from Men & Magic, page 6.

The situation was well known, and indeed by design, right from the start.

A couple of pages later, we find "Halflings: Should any player wish to be one, he will be limited to the Fighting-Man class as a halfling. Halflings cannot progress beyond the 4th level (Hero), but they will have magic-resistance equal to dwarves (add four levels for saving throws), and they will have deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL."

Is there any suggestion that a halfling hero is in any way the equal of a human wizard? No; they are clearly unequal (except for a couple of saving throw categories). Does it follow that the game is unbalanced?

No more than it follows that chess is unbalanced because a pawn is not on par with a queen.

Note: Wizard in pre-2e sets is a magic-user level title gained at "name" (in Original or Advanced, 11th) level -- so there is no such thing as a "low-level" wizard.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

A couple of pages later, we find "Halflings: Should any player wish to be one…

That line from Men & Magic never fails to make me chuckle.

(I'm not a fan of halflings, or their many variants, as a PC race. I love hobbits as a literary device in Lord of the Rings, but find them a poor fit in my D&D games.)

 

[Ariosto]

It may be ham-handed, but I think the intent was simply to get more players engaged at the same time.

What, again, is it that keeps players from being "engaged" without 4e "skill challenges"? I missed that part. So, yeah,

This is apparently something that many of you have not seen as a problem in your games. So maybe it looks so bad to you because they're trying to fix a non-existent problem.

And it works. Traps are more interesting than Perception check followed by Disable Device check... OK, people besides the rogue can start playing again.

Yeah, obviously NOBODY got to play D&D before getting Supplement I. ??? The way some people chose to treat the thief presaged the way some people chose to treat darned near everything in 3e -- and the designers of 4e delivered a game made just for them. Was that the Gygaxian design? No.

Different games.

Different balances.