Tony Vargas
Legend
Hey, I lost my hair naturally. Genetics, testosterone, age.
What is the essence of D&D
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Wait is that a thing...It's not Festivus; we do not need the ritual airing of grievances.
Tony Vargas
Legend
It was a skit on some comedy show. SNL? Seinfeld? Friends? ...something inexplicably popular in the 90s, anyway...
L
lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
aramis erak
Legend
Seinfeld created a new holiday tradition that some people actually follow. Not me, but some friends of mine do, complete with the ritual airing of grievances.
My faith tradition has twice a year, minimum, forgiving ones who have wronged one, and asking forgiveness for wrongs done. Preferably as part of a paraliturgical celebration.
D&D flavors have a preference spectrum not unlike many mainstream religions... a few devout faithful, a good number of regular participants, including a range of levels of participation, a lot of lip-service and "go to meeting for the social after", and many more who look on with sheer disbelief.
MichaelSomething
Legend
There are plenty of ways to balance magic vs mudane!
1. Attach a large time and money cost to the most powerful spells! An hour casting time and 1000 gold cost will balance a lot of spells. 4E Rituals and spell componets did this; which lots of people didn't like.
2. Casting an OP spell? Roll a D20 and kill your character of you get a 1! Risk vs reward. The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG has something like this.
3. Force spell casters to ration spells! Three to ten spells slots vs six to eight encounters a day means you don't cast willy nilly. Its how 5E solved it.
4. Make the wizard a carry. You make wizards suck at the lower to make them earn late game brokenness. It's the classic solution.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Which of them provided anything approaching climactic encounter changing benefits for non-magic aside perhaps from skill challenge structures and 4e assumptions of utility power equity and resource similarity.
Yeh it can but not if you decide to make wealth an utterly indeterminate thing. That only works in 3e and 4e actually. (ok one might be able to compute expected wealth in 1e and 2e from random encounter tables but not easy)
Yeh one could put risk vs reward in D&D by having spell casting cost hit points as standard and other similar things or one could allow anyone to perform heroic exertions that allow feats of Martial Prowess or feats of Magic of appropriate style. OOPs I just introduced resource commonality to get martial types similar benefits
To be clear big climactic significant awesome is part of the imbalance. So magic is more powerful just sucks because it's basically a lime light issue. Oh right random crit fisher fighter gets limelight randomly instead of when its needed gee that cannot be a problem. (everybody should like lack of strategic and tactical choice)
Actiual seen use in the wild 3 or maybe 4 encounters a game week. Shrug assumptions about "encounters a day" having variable impact on your characters depending on which subsystem the game designer thinks is appropriate is a pretty willy nilly as far as everyone contributing. Kind of locks down the story flow. Instead of player choice.
Presumption people begin campaigns at level 1 and play through out when even the games designers didnt do that ... regardless even if they do what you really get is constant imbalance not actual balance. so yeh that was bull when I seen it in 1976.
Point is no balance was never easy to achieve.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Technically making magic items less overwhelming/awesome I feel was really to emphasize the hero themselves not their toys AND was something easily adjusted by a DM in 4e if you wanted to with relatively low impact. A player could similarly attribute the skill they just gained or even multiclassing feat they gained as an effect of the sentient sword and do there own my magic item is awesome thing. Flavor wise most of the time my ranger or warlord or fighter or whatever being dependent on something a caster theoretically made to have awesome is kind of meh - So I like that it is flexible I might want to play an Elric dependent on his blade for even some of his attributes (but I can just omg roleplay that) but not necessarily.
To me the sedateness of item power was not actually a tool to balance things and has low impact in that arena from initial fluxiness when you acquire an item. (one could make it take a level to open / acquire a power of a multiple power item and that would go away).
- So I like that it is flexible I might want to play an Elric dependent on his blade for even some of his attributes (but I can just omg roleplay that) but not necessarily. To me the sedateness of item power was not actually a tool to balance things and has low impact in that arena from initial fluxiness when you acquire an item. (one could make it take a level to open / acquire a power of a multiple power item and that would go away).
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Assuming they achieved this the argument the casters are balanced with the piddling couple of non-caster classes sounds like well probably not.
TheCosmicKid
Hero
...
Okay.
You really don't see the problem with what you're doing here, do you?
You quibble my choice of the words "broken" and "secret", but those weren't the meat of my critique. The meat of my critique is that you're trying to tell me that you know why I switched from 4E to 5E better than I do, and although the reason you've invented is conveniently uncritical of 4E, it manages this trick by being unflattering to me instead. Do you want to know why I switched? Ask me. I will not use the phrase "Primacy of Magic". I will not give any explanation that could reasonably be called "Primacy of Magic". And I will not be impressed by any attempt to bend my words into a "Primacy of Magic" framework.
And don't write me off as an exception to your generalizations, either. Ask a whole bunch of other players who made the upgrade. You will get a broad variety of reasons. Will some of them give you stuff that sounds kind of like this "Primacy of Magic" idea? Yes, of course. But if you cite those reasons to say "Aha! I was right! Primacy of Magic is the essence of D&D and the reason why 4E failed through no fault of its own!", and ignore all the other reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Primacy of Magic but maybe do find some fault in 4E... well, then, that's what's known as cherry-picking.
