D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[Bedrockgames]

I agree that many balancing mechanisms for spellcasters in the 1e/2e rules ended up cut from 3e. I suspect 3e desigers were responding to reports of how D&D was actually played by groups on the ground and what was reported as not being very fun. How many veteran 1e/2e players can honestly say that they meticulously tracked material components? Spell memorization times? Quite a few did, I'm sure, but I'd also bet that a whole lot did not do so as well. Plus, using the chance to know a spell could lead to a wizard being unable to cast some serious bread-and-butter spells. How fun is that? How fun is tracking a long casting time? My guess is they dispensed with a lot of the complaints players had but didn't sufficiently redress what happens when they're gone - particularly once they added cyclical initiative (which has its good points from a gamist mechanic point of view, but compounds this particular set of problems).

I used and use these, because to me they are important balancers but also key things that help create a palpable setting. I can understand someone not wanting to use chance to learn spell, but once it is in play, it doesn't take away from the game imo. Things are only bread and butter if you allow them to be. So often in threads about magic users being broken (whatever the edition) people point to scenarips involving particular spell combos or specific spells. That is only a problem if you can rely on gaining any spell you want. Chance to learn spells, enables there to be some fun and shiny spells on the list that are not a certainty of having. Not an approach that is for everyone. I prefer it a bit.

 

[Obryn]

The life lesson I take away from this example, and a couple of prominent others, is to be wary of the "unfun" complaint when it comes to some aspects of the game. There may be good reasons why a few things are "unfun" as some players put it.

As I said upthread, I completely understand why a lot of tables ignored the fiddly bits. I know mine did. Because, frankly, I don't find this micromanagement fun at all. It was a balancing factor, sure, and a potentially strong one at that, but it's pretty exhausting to actually implement. (I had a DM who used them, and it was a bore.)

I think a better lesson is that unfun balancing mechanisms should be avoided in favor of fun (or invisible) ones. Take, for example, spell interruption, which created interesting tactical challenges.

Another lesson? When making changes to a system, you should probably understand what effects it might have. The 3e team didn't do their homework enough, here.

 

[pemerton]

I think a better lesson is that unfun balancing mechanisms should be avoided in favor of fun (or invisible) ones.

Agreed.

Also, thanks for the detailed breakdown of AU/AE - very interesting.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As

I think a better lesson is that unfun balancing mechanisms should be avoided in favor of fun (or invisible) ones. Take, for example, spell interruption, which created interesting tactical challenges.

e.

I think the difficulty with this as a measure is people will strongly disagree on what makes for fun. Just taking spell interuption as an example since you refered to it. I love spell interuption, i think idies wht you say here and believe it adds to the fun of play. But one of my co-designers hates it with a passion, and says it ruins his fun because it frustrates him. I've been working with the same two guys on design for a year and half, and this comes up a lot whenever we talk about fun as a measure. On the one hand you want to maximize fun at the table, on the other what is fun for one person, kills fun for anoher.

So whenever one of us said, I dont want that option because it leads to X and X makes for ufun play. We really had to unpackage what the person was saying.

i think we are seeing this in the alignment discussion, where things i find fun, ruin the fun for pemerton and vice versa.

 

[Obryn]

I think the difficulty with this as a measure is people will strongly disagree on what makes for fun. Just taking spell interuption as an example since you refered to it. I love spell interuption, i think idies wht you say here and believe it adds to the fun of play. But one of my co-designers hates it with a passion, and says it ruins his fun because it frustrates him. I've been working with the same two guys on design for a year and half, and this comes up a lot whenever we talk about fun as a measure. On the one hand you want to maximize fun at the table, on the other what is fun for one person, kills fun for anoher.

So whenever one of us said, I dont want that option because it leads to X and X makes for ufun play. We really had to unpackage what the person was saying.

i think we are seeing this in the alignment discussion, where things i find fun, ruin the fun for pemerton and vice versa.

Oh, certainly there's room for differences of opinion, but I think "nitpicky tracking of spell components" is a particularly niche one which I don't think is considered widely entertaining. This is not to say that nobody at all finds it fun, but I think it's a fairly small set of people who would say, "yay, now I get to shop for paper cones and bat guano!" Which led to it being phased out, but there was no counterbalance introduced.

You need to keep your audience in mind, for sure, and then make the best design decision you can for the theme your game is trying to meet.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think it's not merely that there were no rules for stopping anyone from dashing past the line of fighters to get to the squishier wizard in the back - but that there were no rules for bypassing the front line either. Take 1e's description of melee combat, for example. What could PCs do? The movement rules describe moving up to engage but don't address shuffling about in combat very much. That was more the job of the thief who hid and spent a couple of rounds moving around the periphery, staying in the shadows, until he was in position to strike. So I would argue it's not any kind of de facto gentlemen's agreement not to end run around the front line because there was no way to stop it. There was no clear way to do it by the rules either.

I was more referring to certain situations where it was fairly obvious that enemies probably could bypass the "front line" like when in a 50ftx50ft room where the 2 fighters charged forward to opposite corners of the room enabling any of the enemies to easily say "I move right past the fighter who charged me and directly at the wizard and attack."

It's pretty much THE reason AOO attacks existed in 3e. Some groups played with a gentleman's agreement to not do this because it ended up with the wizard dead almost every time and some groups said "What? Why wouldn't the enemy go after the wizard who is throwing huge fireballs from the rear? It makes the most sense to completely ignore the fighter standing in front of you."

Our group had many an argument about it since we were playing 6 different D&D games at once with 6 different DMs and would only vote on which game to play each week. Each DM had their own take on whether or not it was considered bad form to purposefully target the wizard.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Oh, certainly there's room for differences of opinion, but I think "nitpicky tracking of spell components" is a particularly niche one which I don't think is considered widely entertaining. This is not to say that nobody at all finds it fun, but I think it's a fairly small set of people who would say, "yay, now I get to shop for paper cones and bat guano!" Which led to it being phased out, but there was no counterbalance introduced.

You need to keep your audience in mind, for sure, and then make the best design decision you can for the theme your game is trying to meet.

I agree people didn't usually care for minor spell components. I think the better solution is to ignore trivial components where they are not even being used as a balance factor (some just have them because) and focus on the few where the components are a significant balance factor ossibly reducing the overall number). It can be a pain to require components for a majority of spells. Occassinally meeding a ruby or blood of a wyvern to cast a spell, can really add to the game by balancing a spell and urging the players to adventure in order to have the right components.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I agree that many balancing mechanisms for spellcasters in the 1e/2e rules ended up cut from 3e. I suspect 3e desigers were responding to reports of how D&D was actually played by groups on the ground and what was reported as not being very fun. How many veteran 1e/2e players can honestly say that they meticulously tracked material components? Spell memorization times? Quite a few did, I'm sure, but I'd also bet that a whole lot did not do so as well. Plus, using the chance to know a spell could lead to a wizard being unable to cast some serious bread-and-butter spells. How fun is that? How fun is tracking a long casting time? My guess is they dispensed with a lot of the complaints players had but didn't sufficiently redress what happens when they're gone - particularly once they added cyclical initiative (which has its good points from a gamist mechanic point of view, but compounds this particular set of problems).

The life lesson I take away from this example, and a couple of prominent others, is to be wary of the "unfun" complaint when it comes to some aspects of the game. There may be good reasons why a few things are "unfun" as some players put it.

Exactly. It's no fun striking out in baseball, but no one, even hitters who strike out 200 plus times a year, suggest removing strikeouts from the game.

In our current 1e game, in which my mujust reached 5th level, here are the spells, I have thus far failed to learn - and remember, unless my intelligence changes, which is rarer than an ethereal mummy in 1E, I can NEVER learn these spells:

Alarm
Fire Water
Hold Portal
Jump
Magic Missile - pretty huge deal here
Message
Mount
Nystul's Magical Aura
Taunt
Bind
Deeppockets
Irritation
Knock
Know Alignment
Leomund's Trap
Melf's Magic Arrow - See Magic missile
Ray of Enfeeblement
Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter
Vocalize
Whip
Cloudburst
Dispel Magic - Another huge one.
Feign Death
Gust of Wind
Haste - Huge in 1E
Hold Person - Huge
Melf's Minute Meteor
Monster Summoning I
Phantasmal Force - Another good spell
Protection from Evil 10' Radius
Slow
Suggestion

That's with a 16 intelligence and only the spell levels 1-3. Do I like it? Not particularly, but I wouldn't change the rules, otherwise every mu would have damn near the same spell list. And I've never seen a group that didn't use the chance to learn spell rules and 1E has been 90% of my gaming since 1981, other than about a 3 year stint with 3E.

I think it's not merely that there were no rules for stopping anyone from dashing past the line of fighters to get to the squishier wizard in the back - but that there were no rules for bypassing the front line either. Take 1e's description of melee combat, for example. What could PCs do? The movement rules describe moving up to engage but don't address shuffling about in combat very much. That was more the job of the thief who hid and spent a couple of rounds moving around the periphery, staying in the shadows, until he was in position to strike. So I would argue it's not any kind of de facto gentlemen's agreement not to end run around the front line because there was no way to stop it. There was no clear way to do it by the rules either.

Actually, you CAN bypass the front line, if given room to do so, but, as you say, once you are engaged, I.E., within 10 feet of an enemy, you must stop and fight him. Your other options are to move away and give him a free attack, and move to engage the wizard (but no attack is possible), charge, which gives you your attack, (but you can only charge once a turn (10 rounds), or falling back, in which you move, avoiding the attack, but moving at half speed. Anyone not engaged in melee, can always use ranged attacks, however.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Oh, certainly there's room for differences of opinion, but I think "nitpicky tracking of spell components" is a particularly niche one which I don't think is considered widely entertaining. This is not to say that nobody at all finds it fun, but I think it's a fairly small set of people who would say, "yay, now I get to shop for paper cones and bat guano!" Which led to it being phased out, but there was no counterbalance introduced.

Though I'd argue the actual balancing factor stayed in the game.

Here's the problem with spell components tracked individually: How much does bat guano cost? How easy is it to obtain? Do people sell it in stores? How many stores sell it? I guess that depends on how common wizards are...How common are wizards? How much bat guano do you actually need to cast the spell? How much space does it take up? How much does it weigh?

The problem is that the rules were basically silent on nearly every one of those questions. So each DM decided on their own.

We had one DM who said there were no such things as spell component stores or magic stores and to acquire spell components you needed to find a cave with bats in it and collect it yourself. To find some of the weirder spell components you'd likely have to manufacture them yourself or go on grand quests. You'd have to carry 3 backpacks to bring all of your components with you and in the middle of combat, you'd have to figure out which pack contained the spell components for the spell you were about to cast and the dig through it until you found it.

We had another DM who said it cost a copper piece per spell component, it was purchasable everywhere there were people and it took up negligible space and weight. You just had to write down "Fireball: 30 charges, Mage Armor: 25 charges" on your character sheet.

In the second DMs game, it wasn't really a balancing factor per se. The only REAL balancing factor was that if someone took your spell components you couldn't cast spells anymore. Which is the balancing factor that still made its way into 3e.

 

[pemerton]

In our current 1e game, in which my mujust reached 5th level, here are the spells, I have thus far failed to learn - and remember, unless my intelligence changes, which is rarer than an ethereal mummy in 1E, I can NEVER learn these spells.

Judging by your spell list, it looks like you might be using Unearthed Arcana. If that's right, you need a Gem of Insight, don't you!

Also, can't you try and learn those spells by researching them yourself? (That works in 2nd ed AD&D, I believe, but I would expect also in 1st ed AD&D.)