NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5028276" data-attributes="member: 4720">But his game was so very clearly not balanced that way in and of itself.  He might have intended for the DM to make that happen, but since a DM was not included in any box set I ever saw, relying on DM adjudication was a fools errand.  Incidentally, the vision of some sort of Gygaxian Mini-me packed in each box is making me chortle with glee.Power and utility of different classes, even by the RAW, is radically different at any given time point, and the aggregate of a typical campaign will vary tremendously with how much time you spend at certain character levels, accidents of loot distribution, or any number of other factors.  This is true to some extent with all games, but far, far less so in modern iterations.And they certainly weren't balanced the way I saw them played, either, which was quite a different thing than RAW.  Before 3e, I don't think I ever experienced two games that were played with the same rules, regardless of which books were technically on the table.  The DM had a metric ton of adjudicating to do constantly.  Personal style of the guy behind the screen had immense effects on even the fiddliest bits of the gameplay experience of everyone involved, far more so than under recent rules.And that's just staying within the rules.  Beyond the burden deliberately placed on them by the rules, there are significant social effects on how the game runs.  In my misspent youth, social pressures required young DMs to re-write the rules constantly or risk the proto-nerd-rage of their fellow suburban kids or the full blown drama of hormone-afflicted high school students.The vast and terrifying variance in table-to-table experience is probably what pushed designers to a more "simulationist" or constrained set of rules when 3e rolled around.  Canalizing the experience from table to table creates more shared experiences and controls partially for the vast and yawning gulfs of experience that separate DMs.This seems like designers responding to an inherent lack of balance in the game as a whole.  In video games, that would have happened quickly since the designers have direct, mathematical access to play experience.  In a tabletop game, you have generational effects.  Each designer probably brought a radically different aggregate experience of "D&D" to the table when it came time to make 3e.  It just makes sense to standardize under those conditions, and since the single largest sources of variance were DM skill and fiddly rules, you standardize the fiddly rules and obviate the need for as much DM adjudication.</blockquote>

Verification