D&D 5E (2014) Why Balance is Bad

[Dausuul]

I'm sorry, I kind of lost track. Why are we discussing 4E again?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I'm sorry, I kind of lost track. Why are we discussing 4E again?

The whole thread is a passive aggressive edition war, of course. Although it's not just pro and anti-4e. There's a lot of skirmishing around 3e too.

 

[Dausuul]

The whole thread is a passive aggressive edition war, of course. Although it's not just pro and anti-4e. There's a lot of skirmishing around 3e too.

Well, D&D Next is supposed to bring fans of all editions together... possibly somebody should have thought a bit more about what that would lead to.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Well, D&D Next is supposed to bring fans of all editions together... possibly somebody should have thought a bit more about what that would lead to.

"We have four competing standards. This is too complex, so we'll make a new standard to reunite all our customers."

1 year later.

"We have five competing standards..."

 

[howandwhy99]

You can't really "unbalance" one PC. A party, yes, but one single PC?

An "unbalanced" party done by design happened often enough in the games I played. Just like the Fellowship of the Ring which was about the most unbalanced party ever setting out for adventure It all depends on the group and what you are aiming to create with the game.

Imagine if every PC received their own personal XP totals and even then per class. And that each class had its own kind of XP. And all PCs began at 1st level regardless of how long the campaign has been going. One player may have a PC of very high level, another player one of middling level, and yet another has just started at 1st. And then there are those characters with more than one class where their ability depends on the types of challenges they are focusing on, their chosen class for the time of play.

A solo game can be unbalanced as most of the game's balance is between character and stuff in the campaign world.

A group game has most of the intra-party balancing in the players' hands, (but not wholly). How much do they wish to share? What do they not want the others to have? It's a cooperative game, but not every one is required to be on equal footing every moment. In fact, as soon as the dice are rolled that stops being the case.

 

[MoonSong]

What you say here about 4e doesn't really fit with my own experience of the system.

One of the PCs in my game is an invoker/wizard who has multiple Skill Training and Skill Focus feats, the Linguist feat, and the feat that boosts skill checks for rituals. At 24th level his typical damage from an attack power is around 20 hp. This is a character who is not especially strong in combat, and makes up for that through competence elsewhere - in knowledge skills and ritual ability.

It is also not uncommon in my 4e game for characters not to attack on their turn - not the strikers, obviously, unless they desperately need to second wind, but the paladin will often spend two actions positioning himself, and the invoker/wizard will often be doing something else with his standard action like dealing with a magical effect (eg trying to shut down a gate or take control of an automaton).

I really need to find a nice 4e group, while I don't really think your game experience with it is anomalous, it is still far beyond what I have experienced.

 

[pemerton]

I really need to find a nice 4e group, while I don't really think your game experience with it is anomalous, it is still far beyond what I have experienced.

Thanks for the nice reply!

I think post-Gygaxian D&D - as the rules and guidelines are written up by TSR and WotC - sometimes suffers from a lack of transparency about how the game works. (And this is somewhat linked to the thread topic of "balance".)

What I have in mind is this: on the one hand it posits that the GM has principal authority over putting challenges in front of the PCs (and at least in 3E and 4e, gives the GM lots of advice and statistical info to help set the level of these challenges); and on the other hand, the way the PC build rules are presented to players tends to create an implicaion that there is the possibility of building a PC that will "beat the GM" (or, at least, the GM's challenges).

In Gygaxian D&D, the idea of better or worse builds would make sense (although the classic D&D rules don't really support the idea of "builds" for non-spellcasters): after all, it is the players who choose their challenges (by scoping out the dungeon, making choices about what they will hit, and thereby doing their best to amass treasure - see eg [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION]'s recent thread about his current AD&D game).

But in a game in which the GM sets the challenges, then assuming (i) that the challenge-building advice for the GM is actually reliable, and (ii) that the GM is applying it sensibly, all "builds" really do is re-arrange the balance of expertise among the PCs. But if the GM is setting challenges that speak to the concerns of the players, this will not be a problem - it will be what is desired. So, for instance, because I have a player whose PC is (among other things) about making the world safe from chaos by eliminating magical anomalies, I am more likely to set encounters in which such anomalies are part of the encounter (and the skill challenge/trap/whatever is factored into the XP budget). And then the players as a whole are no worse off for the party containing the builds that it does: if they had another strong combatant in lieu of the mage, I would just set fewer challenges involving magical anomalies and more involving straight-up combat.

In this context, the principal balance issue is one of overshadowing/niche-protection: ie it shouldn't be the case that two players, both building (say) ranged strikers, can end up with vastly different capabilities in ranged combat but with no offsetting domain of alternative expertise for the weaker striker. I don't think 4e is perfect for this, but luckily I've found it to be reasonably robust. (Oddly enough in my game it is the sorcerer who is in danger of overshadowing the ranger rather than vice versa.)

I don't know if the above makes sense - the ideas are reasonably clear to me, but I'm not sure I'm expressing them well.

But ploughing on, two further comments:

The most transparent RPG I know that reflects the thinking above is Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised. PC builds are numbers next to freely chosen descriptors - so all PCs start identically in numerical terms, and differences are entirely in the fiction. So there is not even an illusion of "winning" the game via clever build - all you do at build is choose what sort of character you want to play in descriptive/concept terms, and then actual play is all about doing your best to engage with and transform the ingame fictional situation so that you can bring your best descriptors to bear. (A bit like a 4e skill challenge - I think the latter was at least somewhat influenced by HQ in its design.)

A corollary of this transparency of PC building is the simplicity of the encounter-building guidelines for HQ revised: it is simply a DC chart (again, quite a bit like the one for 4e), where the GM sets the DC based on (i) the average bonus the PCs have next to their descriptors, and (ii) the desired difficulty of the encounter. So there is not even the illusion that the playes could somehow "beat" the GM by clever PC building - all the intellectual and emotional effort is shifted into engaging with the fiction.

The second comment: everything I have said above about post-Gygaxian D&D will break down if the GM is not actually setting encounters based on the players and PCs s/he is GMing, but is simply following someone else's script (eg a module or adventure path). Once this is happening, if the the players want their PCs to survive and prosper then they will have to build so as to match themselves to the pre-scripted challenges. Furthermore, if they know that the GM won't deviate from the script even if the encounters it contains are not mechanically adequate to the players' builds for their PCs, then it does become possible to "beat the GM". I don't know how much of 3E and 4e play takes place in this sort of context, but my impression is that it is a non-neglible amount.

My own view is that this sort of context generate a significant and distorting pressure on the game design, and that it is a very challenging context in which to generate both satisfactory rules and really satisfying play experiences. But I think my view on this is probably a minority one.

 

[Texicles]

I'm honestly a little curious about the degree of opposition to balance held by those of you who take a fairly generalized "balance is bad" stance. I'm mostly referring to class balance, and "you" is not directed any specific individual.

Would you say that you feel that, ceteris paribus, balance is actually less preferable than imbalance? i.e. if the game is balanced it will suffer for the mere fact that it's balanced.

or...

Would you say that you feel that balance is bad because you don't necessarily think it's good? i.e. you'd prefer not to have balance, you'd rather development focus on something else, etc.


Obviously, over the course of this (and other, recent, similar threads), no small number of individuals on this forum have stated that they value balance. We must assume, unless anyone produces statistical data, that the weight of your distaste for balance is roughly equal to the weight of balance preference, and that posters here are a rough approximation of the D&D community writ large.

In the case of the latter group, the answer is pretty simple really: balance the classes, because while it's not a priority for you, some people do want that in their game. You can ignore it and the people who want it, get it. Your fun and my fun are not mutually exclusive.

In the case of the former though, I feel like people who think balance is literally bad, in and of itself, are saying that what they want out of a game is more important than what I, or anyone else who favors balance, wants. I call shenanigans. In this case, your fun and my fun are mutually exclusive, so one of us will get what we want out of 5e and the other won't, but neither of us get to decide, so there isn't much point playing "I want this not that, and if you want that, you're wrong" and trying to pretend it's discussion and debate.

 

[Hussar]

Texicles it's actually fairly simple. Throughout 3e, there was a pretty common refrain that because 3e was more balanced than earlier editions, DnD had jumped the shark and was no longer "really" DnD.

4e took balance even further and the whole edition warring facade simply shifted forward.

 

[Dausuul]

In the case of the latter group, the answer is pretty simple really: balance the classes, because while it's not a priority for you, some people do want that in their game. You can ignore it and the people who want it, get it. Your fun and my fun are not mutually exclusive.

In the case of the former though, I feel like people who think balance is literally bad, in and of itself, are saying that what they want out of a game is more important than what I, or anyone else who favors balance, wants. I call shenanigans. In this case, your fun and my fun are mutually exclusive, so one of us will get what we want out of 5e and the other won't, but neither of us get to decide, so there isn't much point playing "I want this not that, and if you want that, you're wrong" and trying to pretend it's discussion and debate.

The common refrain I'm seeing from the anti-balance folks is, "I should be able to make a character who sucks at combat and is awesome in social or exploration scenarios."

Worth noting, this is not actually an "anti-balance" position. It's an argument for changing the scope of balance, to balance across all three pillars at once instead of within each pillar. 5E is doing some cross-pillar balancing already. The rogue is better at social and exploration scenarios than the fighter but strictly worse in combat (slightly lower damage, significantly weaker defense). I would argue that taking this to extremes, where you build characters that are actually useless in combat and completely dominate somewhere else, is undesirable for the standard PHB classes, because it leads to situations where half the time Sneaky McRogue is sitting around doing nothing, and the other half everyone else is sitting around watching Sneaky do everything. If provided at all, this should be an advanced option in supplemental material.

(I do hope that we get at least a few options for "support" combatants, though--characters whose combat contributions don't involve dishing out damage. Someone brought up the idea of a "white mage" who only heals and buffs, never attacking. I think this is a great idea and I want to see it. Likewise, I'm a big fan of the control wizard who would never dream of dirtying his hands with bat guano, and the trickster rogue who distracts and confounds opponents instead of stabbing them to death. Such concepts are challenging to design, but IMO worth the effort.)

My own position is broadly in the pro-balance camp, but I do think 4E sacrificed too much in pursuit of the perfect combat balance. In particular, cramming every class into the rigid AEDU structure was a huge mistake. It created unnecessary complexity (fighters getting a dozen minor variations on "I hit it with my sword") and ill-served players who weren't fond of the AEDU mechanic. In traditional D&D, if you hate Vancian magic, you have the option of playing a noncaster or (in 3E) a spontaneous caster. In 4E, if you hate AEDU, you're screwed, or at least you were until Essentials. Fortunately, 5E seems to be doing much better at maintaining solid balance while preserving the diversity of class mechanics.