Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5042672" data-attributes="member: 18280">Probably because you are taking the quote out of context, as is Gimby.  Or perhaps the idea is simply harder to understand than I think it is.  Maybe I am not explaining myself well.When designing a role-playing game, one chooses how much balance is inherent in the rules, and how much balance has to be created at the table.  Balance inherent in the rules occurs through a process of eliminating emerging properties that might otherwise damage that balance.  Whatever emergent properties you believe the GM can handle can remain in the design.  This is true no matter what the game system, and whether or not the designer(s) thought about it in these terms.  It must be true.  There is no other way to create game balance than by controlling emergent properties that would threaten that balance.This is simple to demonstrate.  A game like checkers has the same pieces, and the same rules, for both players.  If each player were allowed to choose three “balanced” house rules that their pieces could follow from a pool of nine, the interaction between those extra rules would create synergies that would allow some combinations of three to be better than others.  Farther up the scale, one deck in Magic the Gathering may be far better than another.  Once each player is using different game pieces (i.e., all characters and classes are not the same), emergent properties arise that threaten balance.  Controlling those properties is done, because it must be done, by making those characters all more similar to each other.  Flattening the curve between them.Many of the limitations in 1e – racial level limits, for example – exist explicitly to generate a specific type of game rather than to simply balance the game.  What AD&D 1e specifically allows is the creation of a number of different character types which, perforce, have different ways of handling the challenges of the game milieu.  Not different “fluff”; entirely different methodologies.  These limitations do not flatten the curve between characters – quite the opposite.  And they can be (again, explicitly) dismissed with by any given GM without the entire system falling apart.  The GM is merely advised to try to understand the system first, so that it can be rebalanced to taste.The argument, for example, that the 1e thief is unbalanced hinges upon the idea that the thief ought to be able to do X because some other class can do Y.  However, the value of both X and Y are based upon specific approaches to the game....and not those at which the thief shines.  The thief, like the magic-user, should not be seeking out combat.  The thief player should be one who enjoys using her brain as much as the dice, because, at the end of the day, it is her brain that is going to tell her to still distrust Door A if her Find/Remove Traps roll turns up nothing.The play experience at 8th level is different than at 1st is not evidence that the above is incorrect.  It shows, again, that the PCs are allowed to be different, and that the design has not constrained these choices for balance.Conversely, 1e does not allow dragonborn as a choice.  I am only talking about a particular type of choice.</blockquote>

Verification