What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Tony Vargas]

I don't mind this sort of long-term balance at all, and disagree with the "pretty much nonsense" claim.

It works in theory - as long as everyone plays their one character, for the whole campaign, including the guy who rolled up an MU who died the first day sitting out the campaign for however many years it lasts - as in, showing up at all the sessions, and saying "I decompose" on his turn.

Short of that, it's prettymuch nonsense.

A simple solution perhaps, but at cost of a bunch of other things not least of which is clear mechanical distinction between classes; and there being no "starter" mechanics-lite or mechanics-absent classes.

You don't need 'starter' mechanics or ways to dodge engaging with mechanics, when the designer has resorted to the extremity of designing functional mechanics in the first place. As for 'clear mechanical distinction between classes' - each class had it's own unique set of features and resources, there was rough parity in the number of each, and attempts made to balance them, but they were separate to a degree not seen since AD&D.

Also, with everything resetting overnight any sort of long-term resource management went out the window, and 5e has sadly perpetuated this issue.

Actually, 5e has taken things back beyond the single day, a bit: HD do take a second day to recharge, and there's actual, if kidna sketchy, Downtime rules. It's not the kind of fiddly bookkeeping we enjoyed back in the day, but it's OK for the kiddies, I guess.

Lan-"finding myself wondering what game-mechanical balance of any kind has to do with worldbuilding"-efan

There's three closely-related threads with all the same folks in 'em, I'm not having much luck keeping them straight.

But, pacing, maybe is part of world building? ::shrug::

 

[Tony Vargas]

Balancing classes isn't relevant to the points about how ability recharges are balanced. They are separate issues altogether. You can have class balance regardless of how abilities are balanced with respect to encounter vs day.

Classes are central to each of the examples you're using, though - D&D having always used classes, even at it's least-D&D-like.

Another reason Gamma World makes a better example of encounter-balancing: no classes to confuse the issue.

4e is also pretty strongly encounter balanced. Yes, it had some daily recharge abilities, but those had little to no effect on individual encounters -- at most healing surges were a daily resource that influenced play, but most play never ran the risk of exhausting healing surges, so it was largely a moot consideration for how you addressed play. I contend that play that seriously focused on the few daily resources was the exception to the rule that they largely didn't matter much in play. I ran 4e for a few years before moving to roll and keep hacks for a few years, so I'm speaking to my experience and to what I saw/read on the boards at the time. Hording surges wasn't a strong play tactic -- they were almost always better as hitpoints outside of a few classes that used them to power abilities.

I played 4e for it's whole run, and still do infrequently, and have run it since 2010, regularly since 2012 (a campaign now at 25th level), so I've seen it play out in quite a range of ways. The claim 4e is primarily or solely encounter-balanced is refuted, objectively, by the presence & signifcance of surges, daily attack powers, item dailies, and milestone-activated resources. Surges do represent an upper limit to how many encounters you can endure without a long rest, so time-constrained scenarios do need to be approached and managed differently. If it were entirely encounter balanced, such considerations would make no difference - as was the case in the corresponding ed of Gamma World.
Daily powers in 4e could easily swing a combat, changing the whole character of it, multiple dailies could enable a party to punch above their weight class and take on enormously difficult encounters, including multiple encounters w/o a short rest (again, not considerations that'd come up in a purely-encounter-based design). Groups under time pressure can horde dailies for an assumed 'boss fight,' but can end up blowing through surges faster as a result, and find themselves under pressure to use dailies less effectively later in the day as some of the group run out of surges and can't afford to grind it out with encounters & at-wills; groups under no time pressure can 'alpha strike' and take down encounters easily, or take on tougher than normal encounters, but doing so doesn't imbalance the classes, just shifts the balance of individual encounters - again, not a feature of a game that's primarily encounter-balanced.

That said, I think the fair point is that 4e had much more robust balance within an encounter, just as it did among classes, relative to other editions. Which is comparing it to extreme examples of attempting to set balance to a specific encounter:rest:time ratio, or even, as someone observed, above (or maybe in another thread, they're all runn'n together), over many levels or whole campaigns. 4e does have modestly robost balance within each encounter, and somewhat more robust balance among classes, and important resources to manage over a given day (without which encounter balance would be a lot more solid). It's closer to the middle of the daily-balance|encounter-balance continuum, if such a thing is even a conceptually valid. D&D, more generally, is over on the daily end.

Really, though, other systems aren't even on that spectrum, not tying anything to calendar days or timed rests.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Classes are central to each of the examples you're using, though - D&D having always used classes, even at it's least-D&D-like.

Another reason Gamma World makes a better example of encounter-balancing: no classes to confuse the issue.

I played 4e for it's whole run, and still do infrequently, and have run it since 2010, regularly since 2012 (a campaign now at 25th level), so I've seen it play out in quite a range of ways. The claim 4e is primarily or solely encounter-balanced is refuted, objectively, by the presence & signifcance of surges, daily attack powers, item dailies, and milestone-activated resources. Surges do represent an upper limit to how many encounters you can endure without a long rest, so time-constrained scenarios do need to be approached and managed differently. If it were entirely encounter balanced, such considerations would make no difference - as was the case in the corresponding ed of Gamma World.
Daily powers in 4e could easily swing a combat, changing the whole character of it, multiple dailies could enable a party to punch above their weight class and take on enormously difficult encounters, including multiple encounters w/o a short rest (again, not considerations that'd come up in a purely-encounter-based design). Groups under time pressure can horde dailies for an assumed 'boss fight,' but can end up blowing through surges faster as a result, and find themselves under pressure to use dailies less effectively later in the day as some of the group run out of surges and can't afford to grind it out with encounters & at-wills; groups under no time pressure can 'alpha strike' and take down encounters easily, or take on tougher than normal encounters, but doing so doesn't imbalance the classes, just shifts the balance of individual encounters - again, not a feature of a game that's primarily encounter-balanced.

That said, I think the fair point is that 4e had much more robust balance within an encounter, just as it did among classes, relative to other editions. Which is comparing it to extreme examples of attempting to set balance to a specific encounter:rest:time ratio, or even, as someone observed, above (or maybe in another thread, they're all runn'n together), over many levels or whole campaigns. 4e does have modestly robost balance within each encounter, and somewhat more robust balance among classes, and important resources to manage over a given day (without which encounter balance would be a lot more solid). It's closer to the middle of the daily-balance|encounter-balance continuum, if such a thing is even a conceptually valid. D&D, more generally, is over on the daily end.

Really, though, other systems aren't even on that spectrum, not tying anything to calendar days or timed rests.

You can jettison almost every one of the daily resources in 4e and encounter dynamic barely change. Hence why I said they're largely irrelevant to where 4e balances in regards to ability recharge.

Healing surges are the exception, but those rarely imposed on play dynamics -- it was a rare situation that number ofctenant surges impacted play to any significant amount.

 

[pemerton]

You weren't active during the lead-up to and the 5e playtest, but there were a considerable number of conversations about prospective 5e design that we had on here that were central to the discussion of play priorities. One of the absolutely most fundamental ones was this:

Balance By the Encounter vs Balance By the Adventuring Day

I don't know if the two paradigms are so opposed as to be mutually exclusive, though. However, as you mentioned, I wasn't active during that period, so I didn't see a lot of those conversations, and so I can't say for certain. But what I mean is that if both paradigms are attempting to balance the game, even though they use different methods, I don't know if they must be strongly opposed. I think you agree at least partially because of your statement about balancing encounters would lead to a balanced adventuring day.

From my point of view, the contrast is this: if the unit of balance is the encounter (scene), then it is possible to allow events to unfold as they do in accordance with the logic of play, complications, framing, etc, without this having any implications for mechanical balance across PCs (which is a feature of a mechanically heavy system like D&D).

If the unit of balance is the adventuring day which is understood to include multiple encounters (eg 6 to 8 in 5e), then the dynamic becomes different. The GM has to have sketched out a sequence of events in advance, or at least maintain the "threat" of such, in order to constrain the use of resources by players whose PCs are on a longer rather than shorter recharge cycle. As well as this implication for pacing and expectations around pacing/framing, there is also another consequence: players who withhold the use of resources out of concern for subsequent encounters which don't occur don't get to use those resources, which leaves those elements of the player archetype unrealised.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You can jettison almost every one of the daily resources in 4e and encounter dynamic barely change. Hence why I said they're largely irrelevant to where 4e balances in regards to ability recharge.
Healing surges are the exception, but those rarely imposed on play dynamics -- it was a rare situation that number ofctenant surges impacted play to any significant amount.

If that's your experience - if your group didn't make much or much effective use of dailies, and if they rarely pushed to the point anyone ran low enough on surges for it to affect their tactics in an encounter - then that's your experience. I've certainly seen dailies have very high impact in specific encounters, and seen being out of dailies or low on surges impact how a character or party had to aproach an encounter (or try to avoid further encounters) - from both sides of the screen.

It's not just that our experiences are hard to reconcile, though - I can see how a narrow range of play, short days combined with unnecessary hording of dailies, for instance, could result in under-valuing surges & daily attack powers, for instance - but I don't see how you can expect me to accept your experiences as negating the facts of the system. 4e granted AEDU classes equal numbers of encounter & daily attacks, the latter being significantly more powerful. That's a lot less concentration of power in dailies than prior eds (which topped out with dozend of dailies, vs 3 or 4 in 4e), and a lot more concentration of power in encounters compared to, well /none/ for most prior-ed characters. But, that's more less daily power & more encounter power, relative to an extreme of all-daily, no encounter.

If you compare 4e to the basic-mechanics similar of Gamma World, for the other extreme, it's adding Daily attack powers, Daily utilities, daily healing surges and long-rest recovery of hps, it's all about daily stuff in that comparison.

Hence it being nearer the middle of the very hypothetical daily-to-encounter spectrum. It provides more robust/consistent balance within encounters than a game that aims to deliver balance only over a campaign or within a day of prescribed length, but less consistent than one that simply resets after every encounter. It's not balanced only around the generic encounter or only at a specific day length - it'd be closer to the truth to say it aims for balance independent of either.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I dont think it has, actually. That 4e is encounter balanced is not something I've ever seen as a complaint. On the other hand, people complaining about how our failed to do a good job of explaining the changes is. On the gripping hand, most complaints about 4e revolve around HOW 4e did its encounter balancing.

You are not the only person in the world. I've heard lots of people complain about how 4E was balance and structured around encounters. I haven't heard to many people complain about how they explained it. I've heard people defend 4E by making that argument, but I've never encountered anyone being critical of the game, say their issue was how the game was communicated.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nope, your job to show that it is a good metric. Dilation why popularity is a good metric for comparing the ability balance points of, say, 1e and 5e. They have very different balance points, so popularity should be a good indicator of something, right?

I think if you are going to dismiss popularity as a consideration out of hand, it is on you to explain why.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You clearly aren't picking up what's being put down if you think that's at all relevant for how there are different ways ability use in game is balanced by recharge mechanics and the repercussions of each. Quadratic wizard; linear fighter may be a design ethic you prefer (and that's awesome), but it doesn't speak to how a game has different play incentives if it has spells recharge per encounter or per day.

I thought we were talking about balance not play incentives. But it isn't my fault if you are being unclear.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Do you have trouble with responding to a post one time?

No, I just dislike communicating in long, multi quote posts.

 

[Lanefan]

As a complete aside: in our session this past weekend my character found herself in a bazaar in a strange city looking to purchase, among other things, a feather.
[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] , I thought of you...