Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?

[Scribble]

Easy Design Goals questions:

* Is 4e designed to be humancentric?

This is a specific design goal of 1e.

Humans gain an extra feat, an extra skill, an extra power, and a bonus to a stat. They also gain the ability to put their stat bonus, anywhere.

So I'd say yes, it's designed to make humans a prime focus, a more versatile race then the others, 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.

You can feel free to disagree.

How about placement/inclusion of magic items? Can anyone tell me how this design parameter has changed, and how that change is driven by differing design goals?

Bueller? Bueller?

Same goal, inclusion of magic items in a game that has a large focus on people going into underground holes looking for magic items and gold.

Better tools: Better placement of magic items in the books, better advice on how to allocate magic in the game, as well as how powerful they are, (for better information on how they will effect the game) combined with better tools for their existence in the game world, and more options with how to deal with them in terms of buying/selling.

Again feel free to disagree.

 

[ExploderWizard]

A better tool in my opinion to achieve the same idea.

Looking at it from a logic angle, "better" = improvement.

Improvement = change. Therefore the game HAS changed.

Change = improvement is where the whole thing falls apart. That is a matter of opinion.

 

[Scribble]

Looking at it from a logic angle, "better" = improvement.

Improvement = change. Therefore the game HAS changed.

Change = improvement is where the whole thing falls apart. That is a matter of opinion.

Sure, I never said it wasn't. In my opinion the changes that have been made improved the experience, but others are free to disagree. Also I feel the changes that have been made don't change the important part, the end goal. They only change the tools we have available to get there. Others can and obviously do disagree.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

If combat scenes are not planned then why are so many "encounter areas" set up like prepared stages with description largely confined to the combat relevant features of the area.

Many are predisposed to the combat focus of an area and that information does make up the majority of the text in a published module. Keep in mind though that a single stat block now takes up half a column on average compared to two lines in 1E. The modules I have purchased from WotC (H1-E1) have setting descriptions that do not pertain to combat and NPC motivations that can circumvent combat. Some of the published adventures are better at this combined description than others, but this is nothing new in regards to a series of published adventures from the publishers of D&D.

What about the other way around? What if the players dont give a rat's ass about getting 5 successes before 3 failures?

Module/Adventure writers have always used this paradigm. They expect an encounter to go a certain way and write what they feel is relevant. Those expectations aren't always met. Some good module writers allow for more freedom. P2: Demon Queen's Enclave is a great example of a module that provides both combat and non-combat setups for the encounter areas.

There are some structured skill challenges in published adventures without stats for NPC's that the PC's come into conflict with because the encounter is set up as a skill challenge.

Same was true in older modules when the PCs weren't expected to fight. And no, "King Jared, F10" does not count as stats. See P2 for an example of a good 4E module that figures this out better.

I never said that all encounters end in combat, just that the adventure makes it pretty clear which ones do and do not.

Just because some DMs see a set of combat stats and a tactics section and ignore the advice in the 4E about encounters not always turning into combats does not mean that the adventure tells you that Encounter A-2 must be combat.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm going to quibble slightly. The 4e module design definitely suggests this. I am not convinced the design parameters of the game itself (the game engine, as it were) do this.

Thank you for the well-reasoned post, Canis. XP to you.

Design goals, regardless of the edition, are not monolithic. Certainly, the designers of 4e knew that players were not always going to be in combat. Since 4e prefers the AP approach (a trend started waaaaayyyyy back with DragonLance and greatly strengthened in 3e due to the success of the Dungeon APs), there needs to exist some means to move characters from scene to scene.

However, the designers were clear that D&D isn't a game about talking to faeries; it is a game about combat. And it shows.

I credit 3e with having the first system in place (complex skill checks) to deal with non-combat encounter conflicts in a satisfying mechanical way. 3e provided DMs with excellent tools to make a game that is precisely about talking to faeries, and to make that "action" meaningful in game terms.

However, the skill challenge system in 4e, as it first appeared, needed a lot of work. It was simply bland and meaningless, with the die rolls having no real effect apart from toting up a score. As the means to move the story along to the next exciting combat sequence, it was a reasonable tool. As a means to exciting resolution in and of itself, not so much.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that skill challenges in 4e, as initially presented, were a pale shadow of more robust mechanics from 3e.

Again, when examining the initial release of 4e, what are characters designed to do? What are their class abilities geared for? I can example class abilities in 1e that are not geared for combat without any difficulty whatsoever....even low-level ones.

Again, we are presented with traditionally non-combat parts of D&D (traps, for instance) that we are asked to treat as though they were combat. What are we to make of this?

In the case of monsters, non-combat utility powers from previous editions are stripped out. What are we to make of this?

In actual play, any given combat will grind away a disproportionate amount of table time to any other encounter type, by design. Contrast this to 1e, where a disproportionate amount of table time is given to exploration and mapping, again by design. So much of 1e's table time is devoted to exploration and mapping, in fact, that elements in the game (wandering monsters, frex) were included to impose some form of limit to the activity. Indeed, the single most common complaint heard on EN World about 1e is the "boredom" imposed by "Greyhawking" a dungeon.

Again, the result of different design goals. And the result of some people trying to fit their round pegs into 1e's square holes.

One would think they would be happy that the games have different design goals.


RC

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

For my own game, I am enjoying my 4E campaign just fine. Like most systems I had to take it out behind the woodshed and teach it a lesson before it was ready for prime time.

Which is something that most gamers seem to have done with every game they've played. Which sounds like "pounding a square peg into a round hole." Heck, RC had to go create his own dang system. I assume the hole of all versions of D&D were the wrong size then.

 

[Raven Crowking]

So I'd say yes, it's designed to make humans a prime focus, a more versatile race then the others, but in a way that doesn't gimp someone's choice to play another race if they want.

This is a logical contradiction.

If humans are a prime focus, as opposed to "one among many", then perforce choosing to human must be preferable to choosing another race.

If no choice is "gimped" then all choices are co-equal. There is no "prime focus".

And, again, this shows in WotC design, and it plays well into the overall marketing strategy as well. After all, who wants to buy "Player's Handbook 7: The Substandard Choices"? It is far easier to sell "Player's Handbook 4: The Better Choices than PHB 1".

This is exactly what happened with 3e, with 2e, and with 1e when the 1e Unearthed Arcana came out.

It is of interest to note that the initial AD&D 1e publishing plan of TSR included a 1e PHB, MM, DMG, FF, MM2, and DDG (all alluded to specifically or already out when Gary wrote about the DMG release in The Strategic Review), but not OA, DSG, WSG, or UA. It is the late sellers -- the "Why would I buy that?"s where power creep tends to happen.


RC

 

[ExploderWizard]

Which is something that most gamers seem to have done with every game they've played. Which sounds like "pounding a square peg into a round hole." Heck, RC had to go create his own dang system. I assume the hole of all versions of D&D were the wrong size then.

Pretty much yes for the stubborn gamer for whom "close enough" just doesn't quite fit the bill. Basic D&D is the closest for me in terms of complexity/ flexibility but that doesn't mean I don't tinker around with it and make adjustments.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Which is something that most gamers seem to have done with every game they've played. Which sounds like "pounding a square peg into a round hole." Heck, RC had to go create his own dang system. I assume the hole of all versions of D&D were the wrong size then.

A correct assumption.

Every era of D&D has had different design goals, as well as different tools to achieve those goals, some of which I prefer to others. RCFG is specifically designed to meet my own design goals, and to provide the best tools I can to do so.

Most gamers IME have plenty of experience with "pounding a square peg into a round hole."


RC

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

However, the skill challenge system in 4e, as it first appeared, needed a lot of work. It was simply bland and meaningless, with the die rolls having no real effect apart from toting up a score. As the means to move the story along to the next exciting combat sequence, it was a reasonable tool. As a means to exciting resolution in and of itself, not so much.

Rules are bland. If you found Skill Challenges bland in the original presentation then I charge that you were the one limited in your imagination as to how they could be used in an interesting way. And I can understand that because the concept is a new development on the complex skill rules.

Again, when examining the initial release of 4e, what are characters designed to do? What are their class abilities geared for? I can example class abilities in 1e that are not geared for combat without any difficulty whatsoever....even low-level ones.

I can name thieving abilities, which have been subsumed by Skills, so those are in 4E. What others can you think of? Spells? I think the non-combat utility of many powers are lost in the newness of the game. At the outset of D&D players had not yet discovered all the neat non-combat ways they could use their spells outside of combat. And players of 4E are now going through the same process, except some have to unlearn the "rules are written in stone" lessons from 3E. I've given advice on how powers and class abilities can be used outside of combat (a warlock cursing an NPC outside of combat in an attempt to intimidate them; allowing powers to be used without the damage component; etc.).

Again, we are presented with traditionally non-combat parts of D&D (traps, for instance) that we are asked to treat as though they were combat. What are we to make of this?

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.

In the case of monsters, non-combat utility powers from previous editions are stripped out. What are we to make of this?

That these were usually handled off-scene and now still are through rituals. No need for detail because they happen out of view of the characters anyway. This is very much like the methodology used in 1E.

In actual play, any given combat will grind away a disproportionate amount of table time to any other encounter type, by design. Contrast this to 1e, where a disproportionate amount of table time is given to exploration and mapping, again by design. So much of 1e's table time is devoted to exploration and mapping, in fact, that elements in the game (wandering monsters, frex) were included to impose some form of limit to the activity. Indeed, the single most common complaint heard on EN World about 1e is the "boredom" imposed by "Greyhawking" a dungeon.

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. And what evidence do you have that mapping and exploration were the default focus of 1E and not just your focus (or your idea of its focus if you never played 1E)?