D&D 5E Why Balance is Bad

[Majoru Oakheart]

This has been a day of firsts. I'm pretty sure you're the first person I've ever seen claim that they had more balance issues in 3e than in 2e. Good grief, your 3e games must have been weird.

WHAT? I had WAY more balance issues in 3e than 2e. I didn't think so at first. But over time, I realized that while I used to think 2e was broken...3e was WAY more broken.

I mean, you can trivially easily make a 1st level 2e fighter that can kill trolls in one round. And that's not really even min-maxing. 18 percentile strength and weapon specs and you're dropping 4 HD creatures in a single round. Add in two weapon fighting and you get up to about 7 HD in a single round.

I agree, this was the problem with 2e. Monsters were too easy. For everyone. Luckily there were no CRs or anything that told you how powerful creatures were. I used to get a little annoyed when a 1st level fighter would take out a Troll in one round...but I'd write it off as "I guess that's the balance this game is going for, I should just use more powerful monsters".

3e had so many more options however that each option stacked on to each other option and created a VAST range of power levels, even within one class. At 20th level one fighter might have +20 to hit while another one would have +50. In 2e, the difference might be 10 points which seemed extravagant at the time but was nothing compared to 30.

The same thing was true of nearly every class. Their power level was nearly unpredictable due to the ability to stack options from a nearly limitless selection of new books coming out.

You might be able to take a really powerful kit in 2e, but at least you couldn't have 10 kits with the abilities of all of them.

 

[pemerton]

I don't know how you can read a bit like "make sure to include chances for every character to shine" and somehow understand that to mean that the rules tell you that you shouldn't have everyone shining in a skill challenge.

<snip>

Except that if you use the rules as they are written, any interaction skill challenge should also include ways that knowledge and physical skills can contribute to success

I think you're slightly misreading here. If every challenge is going to have an opportunity for significant contribution by physical effort, for instance, then we have no purely interaction skill challenges.

An alternative way of going, which is consistent (I think) with what [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] has been saying, is like that which I adopted in this session: the fighter was able to make an Athletics check to convey that he, like the Baron with whom he was dining, was "a man of action". As that post explains, the players also used various other strategems to enable the fighter to either contribute (eg by providing a demonstration of how he bested some gelatinous cubes) or to be taken out of the situation (by going off with his friend to take a leak).

This is at least my understanding of the sort of thing the 4e designers had in mind. Everyone is able to contribute, but only because the players play cleverly - which is (for me at least) an important part of the game. And it's hardly as if they all contribute in the same way. (Though if you read that posts you'll see that, in the end, it was the fighter who brought things to a head.)

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is at least my understanding of the sort of thing the 4e designers had in mind.

Skill challenges are an odd duck. They can be run in so many different ways.

The way they are written in the DMG makes it sound like every skill should ALWAYS be useful and that skills that aren't useful should be a rarity. But then they go and give an example where Intimidate simply won't work in a skill challenge because the person WILL NOT BE BULLIED. So any attempt to use it is an automatic failure.

Later, in a missive from the higher ups at Living Forgotten Realms(which I believe came directly from WOTC), they pointed out that we should never design skill challenges that have skills that are IMPOSSIBLE. Skills that are hard to use should use the Hard DC. However, we had to list the Primary and Secondary skills in a Skill Challenge. Skills that were primary could always be used to get a success. Secondary ones often gave you bonuses that you could apply to primary skills in order to succeed. However, skills that were in neither list...well, I guess they were either impossible to use or just as useful as primary skills depending on the DM.

That's the real problem. It makes more sense if you can't use Acrobatics to convince the king of something unless the King is actively watching you do Acrobatics. But if you don't allow the Fighter to use Acrobatics, then you are purposefully saying "Don't involve yourself in this Skill Challenge, it isn't for you."

 

[keterys]

My fighter never Athletics-ed up a king cause Athletics happened to be his best skill, but some of his most memorable moments were interaction checks using Insight and Diplomacy.

And my bard sure is light years ahead of my fighter at Diplomacy, barely on the same die, but that doesn't mean I didn't get to shine several times in pure interaction challenges.

Reminds me of a barbarian who was scared to make a Charisma based check so wanted to use Endurance to get an NPC drunk - which I totally let her do, but I _also_ had her make a Cha-based check, which she did quite well on and with the bonus I gave from her Endurance, she made a life-long friend, accomplishing the task.

Every class in 4e can think about the type of challenges they're likely to run into and take skills related to interaction, exploration, and survival such that they are not a hindrance and might be a life saver. So, yeah, they _can_ shine in any encounter, if they put their mind to it.

Oh, and skill challenges should also never ever be that Baron complexity 5 12 success Diplomacy (and Intimidate autofails) monstrosity. Cause yeah, I played one lof those once, as the party face. And we RPed a bunch, everyone made some checks, and then I just picked up several d20 and rolled the remaining Diplomacy checks all at once cause the SkC part was irredeemably stupid (and the DM hadn't gotten the hint to move along).

 

[pemerton]

It makes more sense if you can't use Acrobatics to convince the king of something unless the King is actively watching you do Acrobatics. But if you don't allow the Fighter to use Acrobatics, then you are purposefully saying "Don't involve yourself in this Skill Challenge, it isn't for you."

Well in this case it's the job of the other players, via their PCs, to make it so that the king does watch the Acrobatics, and has a reason to care about it.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Well in this case it's the job of the other players, via their PCs, to make it so that the king does watch the Acrobatics, and has a reason to care about it.

Maybe. I find in most cases, this isn't possible. Nor is it necessarily preferable to have to role play that all out. I much prefer skill challenges that go quickly:

"I use Acrobatics to impress the King. I do a backflip right there on the spot: 34."
"Uhh, sure, that kind of impresses him. Have a success. But that's the only success allowed via Acrobatics"

Then again, I like getting them over with as quickly as possible. If it takes more than 10 seconds to role play the use of one skill, you're taking too long.

 

[pemerton]

Maybe. I find in most cases, this isn't possible. Nor is it necessarily preferable to have to role play that all out.

<snip>

If it takes more than 10 seconds to role play the use of one skill, you're taking too long.

OK, we've got quite different preferences on this.

I figure a comp 5 skill challenge should take around an hour or so (maintaining the ratio of around an encounter's worth of XP per hour of play), which - with no more than 14 checks primary checks plus, let's say, 6 secondary, is several minutes per check for at least some of them.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Why do you feel the need to force your play style on other people?

My play style is irrelevant, since I'm advocating for style-neutral rules.

 

[pemerton]

My play style is irrelevant, since I'm advocating for style-neutral rules.

Do you think it's relevant to this claim that at least some players with other styles find your advocated rules to be not style neutral?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Do you think it's relevant to this claim that at least some players with other styles find your advocated rules to be not style neutral?

Relevant? In theory. But not in actuality if said players are wrong in that contention.