Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?

[Jhaelen]

No, it evolved into a role playing game. There is a vast difference. Gygax had to create and/or adapt things as he went along. He could not just sit down one day and say I am going to design a RPG. No one even knew what and RPG was. To say that his orginal creation is the end all of what is a role play game is like saying a Wright Brothers Flyer is the end all of what a aircraft is.

LOL.
Let's see:
He knew what roleplaying was.
He knew what a game was.
So all he did was combine two well known things to create a roleplaying game.

You're right about one thing though:
It wasn't really Gary Gygax who first thought about roleplaying. That was Dave Arneson's contribution. Check out the wikipedia entry for some background info.

But my main point is this: AD&D was released in 1977. That's three years after OD&D and six years after Chainmail. And you claim that after all these years he still hadn't intended it to be an rpg?! Have you even read any of the AD&D books?

P.S.: Please be more careful when you're quoting people. Your above posts attributes several things to me that I did not write.

 

[BryonD]

An NPC within the party - at least, those I run - is no more nor less scripted than the PCs are.

I agree 100%.
If someone told me that my npcs are scripted, I'd find that quite boggling. This applies even to npcs that are not part of the party. I know their story and motivations to the extent they are relevant. But how they will end up interacting with the party is frequently unknown until the moment arrives. And quite often it is far different than what I would have guessed.

Pretty exactly the same as when I run a PC.

 

[BryonD]

But my main point is this: AD&D was released in 1977. That's three years after OD&D and six years after Chainmail. And you claim that after all these years he still hadn't intended it to be an rpg?! Have you even read any of the AD&D books?

I think Garmorn must be confused on his timeline or something.
The general concept of how RPGs evolved is reasonable. But you are exactly right. The idea of actual RPGs was established well before AD&D 1E came along.

 

[Garthanos]

That's a category error. Games don't progress linearly the way technology does, which is why Monopoly, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit are nearly identical today to their original incarnations.

A better comparison is with sport. You could say that Gygax invented sprinting, and that many modern sports now include a sprinting component along with other, more complex rules. But would anyone really argue that, say, NFL football is a direct, linear improvement on athletics which renders sprinting obsolete as an event?

I would say Gygax added peanut butter with chocolate, both existed formalized rules for conflict resolution and role playing. His recipe was chocolate with a peanut butter frosting ... OD&D had only a glaze of peanut butter. D&D3 had the peanut butter as shell on the outside and 4e its a chocolate cup..... Note with any recipe there are enough cooks variations that they are sometimes more important than the original recipe.

 

[Garmorn]

That's a category error. Games don't progress linearly the way technology does, which is why Monopoly, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit are nearly identical today to their original incarnations.

A better comparison is with sport. You could say that Gygax invented sprinting, and that many modern sports now include a sprinting component along with other, more complex rules. But would anyone really argue that, say, NFL football is a direct, linear improvement on athletics which renders sprinting obsolete as an event?

No NFL football was an out growth of an earlier sport. The whole concept of an regulated contest we call sports evolved out of activities that did not have rules then very vague rules.

I am not belittling Gayax and crew. It took a lot of work and imagination to create RPG's. For another example closer to home. Table Top War games grew out of military training programs.

 

[Hairfoot]

No NFL football was an out growth of an earlier sport. The whole concept of an regulated contest we call sports evolved out of activities that did not have rules then very vague rules.

I am not belittling Gayax and crew. It took a lot of work and imagination to create RPG's. For another example closer to home. Table Top War games grew out of military training programs.

For that to work as an anology, the precursors of NFL would have had to spring into existence in sedentary societies that had no history of running, which is of course impossible.

The point is that it's inaccurate to portray games as a technology that gets objectively better with time. Newer variants of a game may become popular, but they don't supercede related but different games.

NFL, for example, came from Rugby, which is less complex but still the more popular of the two, while Rugby came from a whole mishmash of contact ball games that include hurling, which is still played, Calcio Storico, which is still played, and Shrovetide football, which is still played. Additionally, those proto-footballs have now divided into games such as NFL, Rugby League, Rugby Union, soccer, Australian Rules, Gaelic football, and XFL (shudder).

As with RPGs, fans of those games will argue for their superiority over the others, but their very existence indicates that each has its own merits which appeal to different groups of people.

I don't think you were belittling Gygax and co, but that the game he created originally is superceded by subsequent editions and similar games in the way the Wright's plane was rendered obsolete by more effective aircraft. I think that's obviously not the case.

It's also worth noting that Gygax made AD&D because he didn't think OD&D did the job he wanted it to, yet there's a thriving community of gamers who prefer his original to later editions. Goes to show.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Read my previous posts. That's not what I'm suggesting.

What your posts make clear is that you Just Don't Get It(TM). Every time you repeat the exact same fallacy because you simply refuse to understand that your premises are false you make it clear that you are Never Going To Get It(TM).

You don't think the game starts until after characters are rolled up. AD&D doesn't agree with you, but you just keep punching the dead horse of your false premise. This is why you're exactly like the guy who thinks that High Card Draw should be balanced after the cards have already been drawn.

Admin here. Hey, please don't go from discussing a subject to attacking a person. It's fine if you don't (and never will) agree with him, but taking personal shots isn't something we ever want to see. Thanks - PM me with any questions. ~ Piratecat

 

[Hussar]

The problem I'm seeing here is the presumption that your PC's would die frequently. Why is that a presumption? Where in the guidelines does it state that you should be switching out PC's every two or three levels?

And, doesn't that balance go out the window anyway? A higher stat character is more survivable than a lower stat one. The higher the stats, the longer the character will survive, and the less it will be switched out. Thus, you still lack balance, because your presumed method of balance - character death - isn't occuring.

But, back to what my original point was, which I think got lost in the scrum:

How can a system be considered designed for balance when, if I use the mechanics of the system, not only will I get unbalanced results, but the guidelines actually WARN me that I will get unbalanced results but then fail to tell me what a balanced result actually is?

The DMG tells me, in no uncertain terms, if I use the treasure guidelines, I will get unbalanced results. But, they don't tell me what is actually considered a balanced result. Is a +3 Frost Brand reasonable for a 3rd level character? How about 7th? 9th? What about Gauntlets of Ogre Power? What level adventure should I put those in?

In thirty plus years of 1e gaming, NOT ONE of you can answer me that. The best answer I can get is, "Well, it depends on your campaign".

And that's my point. If balance depends on something other than the mechanics, then the mechanics are designed for balance. Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. People keep dragging poor 4e into this conversation and I have no idea why. It doesn't matter to this conversation what 4e has done. Or any other edition for that matter.

To repeat, if maintaining balance requires something other than the mechanics, how can you consider that system designed for balance?

 

[Garmorn]

It's also worth noting that Gygax made AD&D because he didn't think OD&D did the job he wanted it to, yet there's a thriving community of gamers who prefer his original to later editions. Goes to show.

Gygax wrote OD&D because he wanted something new. If he knew every thing about what he wanted he would have written AD&D. He didn't he created a new game. Saw the possibilities and then added to it. Eventually he got AD&D. Later he made other changes and created other games. It is a natural growth. It was not planned from the start nor did he have a complete understanding of how things worked.

 

[Raven Crowking]

The problem I'm seeing here is the presumption that your PC's would die frequently. Why is that a presumption?

That wasn't necessarily the presumption. Rather, the assumption was that the GM would have a group of players that didn't always all play together all of the time.

Thus, if Character X is on quest Y with Characters A, B, and C, and at the time the players of Characters D and E want to go with Character X's player to Dungeon J, then that player would naturally use a different character.


RC