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Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Bullgrit
Adventurer
I'm not arguing. I was originally interested to hear your point of view on the subject, but your methods of "proving" it with unrelated information (and disregarding direct information), and "disproving" other points of view by knocking down strawmen isn't interesting me. I'm just telling you how it looks to me: bad methods.Raven Crowking said:
Bullgrit
Raven Crowking
First Post
Hardly.
1. What unrelated information are you talking about? Why do you consider it unrelated?
2. What direct information are you talking about?
3. What strawmen are you talking about?
But, again, ad hominem is (apparently) far easier than cogent argument.
RC
Jeremy Ackerman-Yost
Explorer
Purely as a player... You don't. The guy writing the game might. He wants it to be fun for new players and experienced players. He wants to obviate the rough edges some DMs might have to ensure the group wants to play again.
Also, what if you're someone who changes groups a number of times as I did? People move. DMs get girlfriends who don't like the game and they suddenly decide the game isn't for them. Etc. With 3e I at least found that DM style didn't completely trump the rulebooks. I could sit down to a 3e game and find enough familiarity to other tables that I could just play. When I was younger... not at all. Every new DM or even new campaigns from the same DM, was like playing a different game entirely.
Let me illustrate. With the change in tables under 3e, you might be playing a different game. But it was like knowing all the rules to Sorry! and sitting down to play Parcheesi. Same concept (standard Cross and Circle game) but the execution is a little different. You catch on quick and are only occasionally slapped by a quirky difference.
With AD&D, I'd sit down to a new game and find it was like knowing all the rules to Chinese Checkers and sitting down to either Axis & Allies or Chutes and Ladders. All 3 are played on a board.... and there the similarity ends.
Selection bias from Hades. People on this board are the people who played Keep on the Borderlands back in the day and are still playing or, like me, still interested in playing.
That is a very small percentage, if I had to guess. I played through that module 3 times myself and had fun once. One of them wasn't recognizable as being the same module. That one and one other were also not recognizable as "fun" or even as a genre of fun that might be enjoyed by a bipedal mammal in some parallel universe.
The problem came from "days of old." You see enough tables tank because of bad DMing for 5, 10, 15 years.... and you start thinking about how you can help new DMs. Leastways I did. If they had brought me on as a designer, that would probably have been my number one priority: Find a way to make DM skill more consistent or less important.
It is admittedly a sad truth that the former is impossible to achieve while the latter is at least something you can attempt.
Exactly.
The former method works for a population that seems common on these boards but who I have only rarely met in real life: people who have a reasonable sense of how to work with rules and change them without bringing death and destruction to the game. I cannot stress enough how rare this type of person is in the wild. ENWorld is some sort of wildlife refuge for this species.
The latter method works better (IMO) for everyone else. And it still has value for people who know how to work with the rules. Tweak and steal away!
As to rate of advancement over years of play; that can vary widely. It really depends on other factors that one must know before "reasonably calculating" the inference of potential X levels in Y years. A low-level character could gain several levels in a single session per year, or a high-level PC just one in many sessions.
On campaigns: Probably the longest regularly meeting campaign is Prof. Barker's Tekumel. Arneson and Gygax apparently went from very frequent DMing for a couple of years -- maybe even about 5 years for Arneson -- and dropped off after that until, in their last decade or two or three, they were running occasional convention games and maybe an annual reunion of old hands.
I don't think that Gygax's views on such matters changed radically from one edition (D&D) to the next (AD&D). The notion that the observation concerning treasure in B1 is inapplicable is very hard to take at all seriously.
On campaigns: Probably the longest regularly meeting campaign is Prof. Barker's Tekumel. Arneson and Gygax apparently went from very frequent DMing for a couple of years -- maybe even about 5 years for Arneson -- and dropped off after that until, in their last decade or two or three, they were running occasional convention games and maybe an annual reunion of old hands.
I don't think that Gygax's views on such matters changed radically from one edition (D&D) to the next (AD&D). The notion that the observation concerning treasure in B1 is inapplicable is very hard to take at all seriously.
I think there is some kind of demographic gulf here between people who have had such a horrible experience and those of us who have not. There is probably a similar gulf between the D&D-mainly or -only demographic and that of people who primarily play other RPGs.
I find it hard to imagine RuneQuest or Traveller players, for instance, countenancing the virtual reduction of the game to a skirmish wargame. The fundamental premise that an "adventure" consists of going from one hour-long (or more) combat scenario to another is not "the same game, better balanced" -- it is a fundamentally different game.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
We run with different packs of dogs, my friend. Your "rare person" is what I'm used to dealing with, because there are so many of them!
Just about everyone who plays in our games sooner or later starts coming up with ideas for rule changes and improvements, some of which are very good. Why is this, you ask? Because, I think, our game system is so obviously kitbashed in the first place it's just assumed to be an evolving entity.
And, that "reasonable sense of how to work with rules and change them without bringing death and destruction to the game" is only going to come after some trial and error. The later editions are not so forgiving of the error part.
Lanefan
Vyvyan Basterd
Adventurer
What game are you speaking of? Because no game I've played fits your "fundamental premise." Your veil wears thin.
Raven Crowking
First Post
It is no secret that, while originally understanding that faster combats should be a goal for 4e, the designers tweaked the numbers so as to give everyone a chance to do "cool stuff". IOW, after taking steps to speed combats up, they went back and slowed combat back down.
Couple that with classes whose utility is completely designed around combat, and designer statements about what D&D is not can easily lead one to the premise that WotC decided what consumers wanted is "adventures" consisting "of going from one hour-long (or more) combat scenario to another."
Going through 4e adventures to find material to convert for my own game leads me to a similar conclusion.
Of course, this isn't limited to 4e. 3e seems, after about 6-8 levels, to be very much caught up in combats that take far too long; 4e has the same problem IMHO. The current module layout also seems to focus very tightly on combat scenes, and this methodology started with 3e.
Even going through Dungeon, looking for maps I can reuse for my game, I can see a definite shift in focus from early Dungeon "whole area" focus to later Dungeon "encounter area" focus. (This is not absolute, obviously, but the pendulum has certainly swung.)
None of this, of course, means that your 4e game needs to consist of going from one hour-long (or more) combat scenario to another -- just as your 1e game might not follow the Gygaxian ideal.
RC
