Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?

[Hussar]

I did not intend a double standard.

1e required tinkering in order to be playable. Tomes of house rules simply to define baseline assumptions and make those assumptiosn playable.

3e allowed tinkering to appeal to a wider number of gamers. Tomes of house rules to detail particular styles of games which differed from the baseline assumptions.

You certainly didn't need many house rules to play 3e. It worked out of the box. The same is not true of 1e. Also, according to Raven Crowking, balance is found in a conjunction of rules and DM, not solely within the rules. Thus the DM is forced to change the rules in order to maintain balance. If balance wasn't an emergent property, then the DM would not be required to alter rules to fit.

Now, I disagree that balance is required to be an emergent property. I also think that if you design a system in such a way that you require the DM to achieve balance in play, then balance cannot be much of a design imperative. In other words, you get a system which is "close enough" and then presume that the DM will make up the difference.

This goes back to the OP and why I don't believe 1e was designed for game balance. Design, to me, speaks to a very formal process which I do not believe 1e ever ascribed to.

 

[Chainsaw]

1e required tinkering in order to be playable.

Come on.. really? Really?

 

[Garmorn]

I did not intend a double standard.

1e required tinkering in order to be playable. Tomes of house rules simply to define baseline assumptions and make those assumptiosn playable.

Come on.. really? Really?

For most of the people I played with - Yes. I would be surprised that it did not need some. Even RC has said the it left balance up to the DM. If that is the case then the DM need to make house rules to get that balance.

 

[Raven Crowking]

People are allowed to look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions.

Yes. But that is what is meant by "double standard"

The evidence is not the same by any reasonable standard, since each game has its own completely unique history.

Then there is something else that is evidenciary which is not presented. It is possible to apply a double standard when describing why you believe what you believe, while your beliefs are still basically correct, because either (1) you didn't examine the evidence well enough, or (2) you didn't communicate it well enough.

You are basically claiming that a handful of raw ground beef and a McDonald's Menu are the same because a lot of rules and variants are used to create the hamburger you desire. Not even close.

No. I am claiming that a large number of house rules/varients cannot be used to both demonstrate robustness and a train wreck.

In Hussar's last post, he suggests that 3e allowed tinkering, while 1e required tinkering. But the extra rules binders/books cited earlier do not actually tell you which is which. They have no evidenciary value by themselves.

Now, I will agree with Hussar that 1e requires tinkering, if tinkering is taken to mean "selecting among options", if for no reason than that one is given a number of options within the system. OTOH, 3e requires tinkering to have a game that I could enjoy. So, I think that this is very much a "different strokes for different folks" thing, and not so much an objective thing. Certainly my houserules under 3e were the most massive houserule volume I've ever created, weighing in at over 600 pages (compared to under 10 for 1e, which also included a campaign gazeteer, and ove 60 for 2e).



RC

 

[BryonD]

1e required tinkering in order to be playable. (...)
3e allowed tinkering to appeal to a wider number of gamers.

I don't buy this distinction either.
Both versions were completely playable by raw and both versions were wide open to customization.

1e's practically random methodology of subsystems made it more likely that a 1e fan would still find something clunky they wanted to change. But that is miles away from "required".

 

[BryonD]

Yes. But that is what is meant by "double standard"

Actually, that is not at all what "double standard" means.

 

[keterys]

This goes back to the OP and why I don't believe 1e was designed for game balance. Design, to me, speaks to a very formal process which I do not believe 1e ever ascribed to.

So, essentially you don't believe 1e was designed at all, at least in the sense of having a true plan and process beforehand. Such an argument makes the poll results far less interesting for me, hmm. I wonder what percentage of those responding that it wasn't designed for balance aren't going "well, they didn't plan to be balanced" but instead are going "well, I didn't think they did a good job, so obviously not"

How about a slight spin, then - do you believe that 1e was created with the consideration that its parts should try to balance?

 

[keterys]

3e was clearly designed for balance, but (in the core books) still gave us Haste + Harm + Polymorph.
4e was clearly designed for balance, and still had Blade Cascade + Seal of Binding + Needlefang Drake Swarms.

Balance being the plan doesn't remove the ability to screw up or to choose to overlook something.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Actually, that is not at all what "double standard" means.

"The application of a principle that is unequally based on arbitrary considerations."

If the evidence is the same, and you are drawing different conclusions, the basis must arbitrary.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Come on.. really? Really?

Quite literally. Yes. Surprise and combat intiative rules were HORRIBLY written, spread everywhere and extremely difficult to sort out, and since Gary didn't even use them himself he had no motivation to ever explain it all. I tried more than once to figure out how to run combat by the book and failed. The very least I learned in the attempt was that the system as written was pointlessly complicated. I've never played a 1E game that did NOT have a house-rule system of combat. It was not until I read ADDICT that I understood how it actually operated and even then there are still disagreements on some elements because of the vagueness of wording in the rules. I was NOT alone in this.

Now this is combat - the most basic, common element that is going to be in any 1E game - and it basically requires a seperate, annotated 20-page document like ADDICT, produced thirty years after the fact, to explain fully and properly how it's supposed to work. If I'd been cleverer in my youth or been more of a rules lawyer I might have sorted it out for myself but the mere process of making the attempt proved to me it wasn't even worth the effort. And this is in reference to my PREFERRED edition of the game.

Despite the fact that SOME people always have played it "by the book", and even ignoring the fact that it was expected that DM's would be making significant changes for their own purposes, for any practical purpose it is quite safe to insist that 1E required house rules.