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

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

what you said gave me an idea for what I think is a good rule of thumb... 1/2 by 1/3

my new rule is it is ok for you to be either half as effective in a third of your encounters or to be two thirds as effective in half of your encounters as a worse case scenario.

but in 3e you could lose ALOT more... if you don't have ranks in UMD and or have a low cha becoming a spell caster isn't much of an option. so fighting with 2 daggers that each hit deals 1d4+2+5d6 as your damage then you drop to 1d4+2 you are losing 5-30 (avg17.5) damage... that is a large drop in efficiency.

Well so is a creature maxing his saves versus spells, or resistance, or SR etc...

Drops in efficiency is all a part of the game. It's part of what gives the game depth. D&D isn't "whack a mole".

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Well so is a creature maxing his saves versus spells, or resistance, or SR etc...

Drops in efficiency is all a part of the game. It's part of what gives the game depth. D&D isn't "whack a mole".

a wizard gets a chance to get past SR, and to raise the DC of his saves... what is the equvalant to get to sneak attack the deathknight?

 

[Balesir]

I don't particularly disagree with any of that, except the "specific and limited" part. Any character can be played in this fashion, and any event can occur. I see no limits other than the processing power of the DM's brain. But no one ever said it was easy.

I'll try to rephrase that, since that's not what I meant by "specific and limited". Immersive play doesn't limit what sorts of situation you can explore, clearly. That is, in fact, a profound part of its draw ("I can imagine myself to be *anything*!").

What I meant was that the necessity for the whole group to be on board with the immersionist aim, and the necessity for considerable support from the GM for such play to be sustained, make it a style that is limited to specific groups who specifically set out for that style of play. It's something of a "fragile flower", and that tends to limit its prevalence (and, to some extent, its popularity, I think).

Now, is some other paradigm of gaming any easier, that's a question.

I can't say I've ever found shared narrative control easy, largely because of confusion and conflicting goals and roles. However, since I did not learn that way, I certainly allow the possibility that I am simply not very skilled at it.

Perhaps the main limitation for it is that it requires specific input from the players - a problem a little akin to that of immersionism, funnily enough! When I get a player group that really goes for it, I'll let you know how difficult it is to sustain ;-)

As a one-off, it's not that hard. More of a "knack" than a skill, I would say. But then my brain may just "get" it easily, I dunno.

Which to me is a problem. I don't characterize such fundamental divides as playstyle differences. They're really different games. To me, D&D or any other rpg has to have clear roles for the participants.

No, they're just styles. The Forge word "Agendas" I think fits very well. It's about what the players want to actually be doing while playing the game. And D&D is by no means limited to only one of them.

Thankfully 3e does that, and as a first generation gamer, I largely follow the books on this subject. That is, I learned Rule Zero by picking up a book and reading it. I don't think anyone who has the 3e books and can read could draw any other conclusion about this paradigm, and how it informs the entire system. Do other games, including other versions of D&D, specify differently, or not at all? Yes. If someone else wants to analyze that social contract that informs other versions of D&D, they are welcome to.

To my mind, building a game that supports a different role for the players (and whatever DM/GM/etc. is posited, if any) is fine, but requires a page 1 rewrite. Since 3e was built explicitly with the assumptions of a strict player/character bond and an omnipotent and interventionist DM, it seems that when people try to play it with a different social contract it sometimes does not work well. This could lead to lengthy discussions about how "balanced" the game is, but I think that's missing the point.

Other have said that you're overreaching, here, and I agree 100%. I played 3e/3.5 for several years (and ran some 3.5), and we did not infer anything like the playstyle you describe from the rulebooks we read.

Well, there is a reason why I'm running CoC right now. But it is CoC d20, and thus is in some sense part of the 3e family. 3e, as constituted, has a lot of unncessary baggage. Since most of us started with 2e, there is a nostalgia factor that keeps us engaged in things like classes and spells. Frankly, I'm beginning to look at this as a collective character flaw among my group (and probably not just my group).

Yeah, I'm wondering why you went with something that has levels and such rather than straight CoC, to be honest. Where you see Classes, Levels, hit points and so on as "unnecessary baggage" with D&D, I see them as the unique selling proposition of the system. If I want a more naturalistic, "human" feeling world with no classes, wounds that work more like they do on real bodies than they do on movie action heroes and world physics that look and feel more like the "real" world, I've got plenty of alternative systems that'll do that. I select D&D for pure escapist action movie fun.

To me, 5e ought to be exactly what I'm talking about, something fundamentally simpler and more generic.

Given what I just said, obviously I disagree. Why add to the pack of "sim" games when D&D is the only "escapist action fantasy" option out there that uses the artefacts of class, level and so on all in one package.

I don't see how any of this is at odds with immersion. In fact, I find that as a DM, focusing more in in-world phenomena and less on metagame agendas is very helpful to producing a naturalistic and emergent flow of events.

It's at odds because making an emergent story happen (as opposed to driving the characters through a pre-envisioned story) requires applying pressure to see what emerges. Without metagame communication with the players, this is generally hard - you don't know where to apply that pressure to get the characters to respond in interesting ways. Without such understanding, the events you concoct to produce pressure can seem contrived, irritating and frustrating to the players.

Immersive sim generally works best if the pressure is low and the "story" fairly gentle. Plots are developed by dangling hooks and waiting for the players/characters to bite, then run a fairly pre-scripted course of events. Pushing hard for story runs a dire risk of breaking either the characters or the players' immersion.

Well, that's the box I was talking about. For example, all the talk of legislating in or out Save or Dies or other forms of quick and random high-lethality mechanics. It may be that some people really don't want these things and that there are very meaningful problems that can arise from their application, but legislating them out of the game removes reams of possibilities and completely changes the tactics. There are cases where getting what you want is not a good thing.

While I have no issues with SoD in general, I don't think its terribly helpful for D&D for a raft of reasons, not all of which can be "fixed". One is that only spellcasters tend to get access to SoD, which gives me believability issues when the world isn't simply run by spellcasters who kill (instantly) any threats to their rule. Another is that we enjoy level 1 to level 20-30 arcs, and those tend to be disrupted by SoD effects. A third is that SoD is generally toxic to dramatic play simply because it's anticlimactic.

In a sim game, though, SoD (or similar) can work fine. As an example, HârnMaster combat is such that an unlucky hit could decapitate your character; no comin' back from that one!

And indeed, that's part of getting emergent events. It's not only the DM that decides whether the character lives or dies, or even the player. It's the dice. That's pretty scary, but it is emergent.

It's certainly emergent, and I wouldn't rule out ever using SoD for gamist or emergent story games, but it can be anticlimactic and it can leave little room for player influence to make the most of dramatically escalating situations (which I realise is pretty much another way to say the same thing, but I still think it expands the explanation of what I'm trying to express).

To me, it's been a learning curve over the years with 3.5 revisionism. If I were starting again from scratch, I might start something else. But is there another system out there that's not only better for me than what I have right now but by enough to be worth making the transition? I'm skeptical of that.

Oh heck, I'm pretty sure that there are several systems that, for your apparent preferences, would be a much better starting place than D&D (any edition)! Just to think through a few:

- Savage Worlds: toolkit-type mechanics light system, maybe with a few features you'd need to remove (metagame mechanics).

- RuneQuest: no classes, no levels, variants on hit points that make them more like "meat". The main downside is probably the lack of D&D tropes in terms of spells, monsters and so on - but the latest edition is not tied to Glorantha (as the first two were).

- Bushido: very canny mix of limited levels (1-6 only) and 'classes' with skills and naturalistic development. Great for immersion, but the main disadvantage is it's tied to a medieval Japanese setting.

- DragonQuest: no relation to Runequest, has a wound/fatigue hit point system, skills by individual weapon/spell/skill group (no classes) and is easy to add D&D classic monsters and so on into (indeed, I did so back in the day - still have the records, if anyone's interested, but they're in an old exercise book...). Main disadvantage - it's OOP.

- The Pool: very light, very free-form, almost perfect for immersive play and free on the 'net (just Google it). Main disadvantage probably that no background material exists for it at all.

- HârnMaster: no classes, no levels, no hit points, very naturalistic game play (best I've ever experienced) but a bit rules heavy. Rather more gritty than D&D, although the magic can actually be very powerful (and as dangerous to the caster as to the target!). Very good for immersive play with a GM who knows the system; I once played over the 'net and even the fact of typing character dialogue didn't break immersion for at least two of us.

Of those, probably DragonQuest and HârnMaster I would see as the best options, but with work to convert "game artifacts" (spells, monsters, etc.) if those are important to you, systems like Traveller or Daredevils (which is a classless derivative of Bushido) would also work.

Oh, and Theatrix could work well, too, if you fancied/could psych yourself up to make the leap to diceless (as in "completely randomiser-less") gaming.

I would have hoped for 5e to be exactly that (and indeed I hoped for 4e to be that before its release), but I haven't seen my hopes fulfilled thus far.

Practically, I think you're bound to be disappointed because classes, levels, hit points as "dramatic pacing" and such are even more bound as tropes to D&D than Bigby's Hand spells and gelatinous cubes. Personally, I glad of this, since I have - after long resisting it - come to love D&D for just those "nonsensical" elements. I think it's the only game that really does them well, and I now have an edition that I think does them better than any other.

That's probably the best argument for balance that I've heard. Darwinism. People will naturally do the best things that they can do, and the ones that get the best results will keep doing it. If there was a type of magic that only ever produced cantrip-level effects, no one would learn it, because it would be a waste of time. So it follows the magic that does exist must be worth the effort and opportunity cost for at least some people.

I'm on board with that. I don't see people talking about balance much in practical terms like that though.

If you look at how 3e handles class balance, it makes perfect sense on the naturalistic level.

Does it really? that's not how I see it. From a naturalistic perspective I think 3e D&D worlds should be populated only by limited numbers of high level characters who eliminate any threats (read: low level characters) as soon as thay appear. The Knights of the Dinner Table may make mockery of PC parties laying waste to towns "because they can, and it's wise to leave no witnesses", but the only thing bothering me is why those towns haven't been wiped out long ago by other classed characters in the world. The life of low level adventurers should arguably be "training dungeons" provided by high level patrons who keep the other high level folk off them while they "grow" into high level folk themselves. The price is that they are beholden to these mentors and likely are magically bound to obey them forever...

I agree that it would be pretty radical.

I also think that it would be a good thing. If the books said right up front what the mechanics represented, it would sure solve a lot of arguments. Of course, it would also require things like having a health system that's defensible as a pure representation of the character's...well...health, and some completely separate mechanical system or systems that addressed all the other things that hit points can be taken to represent. It would be quite an endeavor, but it would provide us with a worthwhile reason to drop $100 or whatever for a new set of books.

Systems with no classes, no levels, in some cases no hit points (or "more realistic" hit point variants), no "armour class", no "Vancian" magic and more are pretty common. I mentioned a few above; here are more:

Ars Magica
Melee and Wizard
GURPS
(Mega)Traveller
Shadowrun
World of Darkness
Hillfolk
Archaeron Games System
Burning Wheel
The Riddle of Steel
Pendragon
Aftermath!
Fantasy Hero
Prince Valiant
Earthdawn
Skyrealms of Jorune

...and those jut the ones I own/have played and so know something of the system. Honestly, if this is what you want, just go get!

Noble Knight and DTRPG are your friends

 

[pemerton]

So the mechanics force upon me a specific setting (not the one I want to play) through treasure parcels thereby increasing 'player entitlement' and you're saying I cannot judge those mechanics as wrong?

I just don't find "player entitlement" a very clear description of the objection. If the issue is that you don't want players to be able to make choices that effect the ingame fiction beyond their PCs (like the location of valuable magic items) just say that.

Whereas the language of "player entitlment" I tend to find overly moralised (and often connected to broader lectures about the inability of conteporary people to engage in delayed gratificatin etc - all of which strikes me as completely misplaced in the analysis of hobby gaming mechanics).

EDIT: Inherent bonuses in 4e don't actually reduce the mechanical prowess of the PCs. They only change the relationship between that prowess and the fiction (ie it is not explaind by reference to magic items). So there is no connection, for instance, between default item-based 4e and "muchkinism" - which is another term often bandied about in the same general category as "player entitlement".

 

[pemerton]

Frankly, I think that's in large part a question of intent. I think the intent was to make a pure simulation, but it's one that fails so badly that people have to try and rationalize it using metagame logic.

I don't think Gygax ever regarded it as, or intended it to be, a simulation.

 

[S'mon]

Whereas the language of "player entitlment" I tend to find overly moralised (and often connected to broader lectures about the inability of conteporary people to engage in delayed gratificatin etc - all of which strikes me as completely misplaced in the analysis of hobby gaming mechanics).

I GM for a lot of people. Running 3e I sometimes experienced a kind
of whiny obnoxious self-entitled behaviour. I have never experienced this while running 4e.
I suspect there is an actual system issue at work there. 3e kinda promises your PC will be a Big Damn Hero, but the mechanics don't really support that, or only very erratically. Eg you can be Save or Died/Save or Sucked very easily, or just wasted by a x3 greataxe crit*. There's a lot of bathos in 3e.

Whereas when 4e promises you'll be a Big Damn Hero, IME it delivers. It doesn't seem to give players much to complain about in that regard. Or for some reason the design just doesn't attract that sort of player so much? Either way, I've never experienced player stress with 4e the way I did
with 3e. I never experienced it with 1e either, mind you.

*This is what happened to my PC (I think it might have been a battle-axe) when I played Pathfinder recently, killed by the enemy's first blow. I tried to take it in good spirits, but sitting out the climactic battle of the mini-campaign wasn't a lot of fun. In 4e I wouldn't have died until well into the battle, if at all, which would have felt more satisfying.

 

[Ahnehnois]

What I meant was that the necessity for the whole group to be on board with the immersionist aim, and the necessity for considerable support from the GM for such play to be sustained, make it a style that is limited to specific groups who specifically set out for that style of play. It's something of a "fragile flower", and that tends to limit its prevalence (and, to some extent, its popularity, I think).

I don't think it's particularly feasible for any playing group not to be generally on the same page. I also suspect that most every group approaches the game from a general understanding that the players are their characters and the DM is in charge, and then riffs off of that to their taste.

Yeah, I'm wondering why you went with something that has levels and such rather than straight CoC, to be honest. Where you see Classes, Levels, hit points and so on as "unnecessary baggage" with D&D, I see them as the unique selling proposition of the system. If I want a more naturalistic, "human" feeling world with no classes, wounds that work more like they do on real bodies than they do on movie action heroes and world physics that look and feel more like the "real" world, I've got plenty of alternative systems that'll do that. I select D&D for pure escapist action movie fun.

Well, for those of us who bought our games from retail stores and depended on a community to furnish players, being a connoisseur of rpgs isn't really viable.

I also don't see that immersion and naturalism contradict the idea of "escapist action movie fun". That's just another thing one can immerse oneself in. Those ideas don't mandate "realism" per se, and indeed the D&D world is clearly not real.

It's at odds because making an emergent story happen (as opposed to driving the characters through a pre-envisioned story) requires applying pressure to see what emerges. Without metagame communication with the players, this is generally hard - you don't know where to apply that pressure to get the characters to respond in interesting ways. Without such understanding, the events you concoct to produce pressure can seem contrived, irritating and frustrating to the players.

It doesn't require that. I think that as shared narrative control is unnatural to me, you must not have mastered the auteur side of DMing.

To be fair, I am probably much better at storytelling than most people, but I don't have any trouble in getting players to do interesting things, or in weaving those individual events together in a coherent manner. I also don't have any trouble seamlessly integrating various influences and making it flow together naturally. Now, was this true when I was doing this at fifteen? Not so much. Effectively leveraging the full potential of the rpg medium is a skill acquired over time.

Immersive sim generally works best if the pressure is low and the "story" fairly gentle. Plots are developed by dangling hooks and waiting for the players/characters to bite, then run a fairly pre-scripted course of events. Pushing hard for story runs a dire risk of breaking either the characters or the players' immersion.

I don't see that at all. I think it works best when the DM is very strong on setting, and knows how the world will react to players and can improvise cogently. I think it also requires that the DM not get married to a particular story, and instead treats DMing as more of a sensationalist experience.

Oh heck, I'm pretty sure that there are several systems that, for your apparent preferences, would be a much better starting place than D&D (any edition)! Just to think through a few:

Not that it isn't an interesting list, but without a reservoir of books to browse through, a bunch of money to buy some of them, and a ton of free time, it's not much good to me personally. And what does do fine for me is the version of 3.X mishmash I run now.

In fact, if I were going to try something new, I'd purposefully not do another fantasy simulation engine, I'd go somewhere very different.

Practically, I think you're bound to be disappointed because classes, levels, hit points as "dramatic pacing" and such are even more bound as tropes to D&D than Bigby's Hand spells and gelatinous cubes. Personally, I glad of this, since I have - after long resisting it - come to love D&D for just those "nonsensical" elements. I think it's the only game that really does them well, and I now have an edition that I think does them better than any other.

I don't think D&D has that strong of an identity. To me, even fantasy is somewhat tangential to what D&D really is.

Does it really? that's not how I see it. From a naturalistic perspective I think 3e D&D worlds should be populated only by limited numbers of high level characters who eliminate any threats (read: low level characters) as soon as thay appear.

I referred to it above, but I think since Star Trek fanship is common enough in my community, it's very natural to us that world-breaking powers and a huge power curve can be managed into something that feels natural (even if on some level it is nonsense).

As to D&D, real castles were inhabited by inbred dilettantes, not the best and the brightest. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the D&D world is likewise not a meritocracy, and that complex social forces keep everything in balance. D&D also has a strong tradition of humanlike interventionist deities, so deus ex machina is hardly out of the question.

I don't think Gygax ever regarded it as, or intended it to be, a simulation.

I sincerely doubt that Gary Gygax invented hit points.

 

[Neonchameleon]

So the mechanics force upon me a specific setting (not the one I want to play) through treasure parcels thereby increasing 'player entitlement' and you're saying I cannot judge those mechanics as wrong? I'm not bashing 4e here, please, I played it I had plenty of fun out of it, even used the inherent system, we are probably going to steal plenty of ideas from it for Next, but treasure parcels (for me, it appears not for you) created a sense of 'player entitlement' that was certainly there in previous editions (for mag items), tacitly perhaps, but when it became part of the core mechanic fueled that entitlement fire.

That depends what you mean by "judge those mechanics as wrong". If mechanics work well to their intended effect and the effect is worthwhile for some groups while not contributing to social problems then no you can't judge them as wrong. You can however say that they are not something you personally like because they don't fit with the way you want to play. And that's absolutely fine.

I don't think Gygax ever regarded it as, or intended it to be, a simulation.

If Gygax had intended to create a simulation he would never have given us hit points. Indeed, Gygax's view on realism has been quoted on these very boards - and is very clear that D&D was first and foremost a game. (I don't believe that at the time he was writing simulation was separated from realism in gaming theory).

I GM for a lot of people. Running 3e I sometimes experienced a kind
of whiny obnoxious self-entitled behaviour. I have never experienced this while running 4e.
I suspect there is an actual system issue at work there. 3e kinda promises your PC will be a Big Damn Hero, but the mechanics don't really support that, or only very erratically. Eg you can be Save or Died/Save or Sucked very easily, or just wasted by a x3 greataxe crit*. There's a lot of bathos in 3e.

Whereas when 4e promises you'll be a Big Damn Hero, IME it delivers. It doesn't seem to give players much to complain about in that regard. Or for some reason the design just doesn't attract that sort of player so much? Either way, I've never experienced player stress with 4e the way I did
with 3e. I never experienced it with 1e either, mind you.

1e doesn't promise that you'll be a Big Damn Hero either People are therefore no more upset when 1e doesn't deliver this than when Call of Cthulu doesn't deliver this. There is no implicit promise in 1e that's been broken when the game delivers a nasty experience. (2e is an odd case because the text absolutely promises big damn heroes, but the rules are almost as clearly not fit for purpose). So when a character dies almost out of nowhere in 1e there's no sense of betrayal - the game has done exactly what it told you it would. That just sucks.

It doesn't even suck that badly - your friends will have all the loot you were carrying, and a new character will take only a few minutes to create; it's not inconceivable that if you died to a lucky blow in the first attack in the battle you can have a new character ready to go before the battle itself is over, and the DM will place your replacement in the next room. Sure, it sucks a little - but them's the breaks.

3.X (definitely including PF) on the other hand appears to promise you a big damn hero. Which means that when you die as a chump the game itself betrayed you. Also characters in 3.X can easily take half an hour to build between the thirty something skills on the skill list, the dozen or so spells the wizard gets (or whatever the cleric is preparing), feat selection, and everything else, which makes creating a replacement character a whole lot more obnoxious than it was in 1e.

4e if you died like a chump you were taking on something that could treat you like a chump. It wasn't a random hit from the second orc grunt on the right who's going to die in one shot to one of your friends. It's because you accidentally blundered into a Roper at level 2. At which point there are only two questions that matter - "Who put that Roper there?" and "Why didn't we see it and avoid it?" (And possibly "How many sessions before we can take revenge as a worthwhile quest? It's a big enough enemy to be worth it.")

Also a mismatch between expectation and reality is, in my experience, the single biggest driver for hardcore character optimisation that isn't simply a game played for the fun of it (no one ever expected to play Pun-Pun). In my experience most people have some sort of conception of their character and what they can do - an expectation guided by the game they are playing. And it's this sense of betrayal at there being a broken promise, combined with the fact that there is something you can do to get the character you were promised that leads to some forms of munchkin behaviour. This, incidentally, is something used by a lot of modern RPGs - when people don't feel they are fighting the rules to do what they want what they want tends to be relatively modest so you don't actually need rules to rein them in for this.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Also a mismatch between expectation and reality is, in my experience, the single biggest driver for hardcore character optimisation that isn't simply a game played for the fun of it (no one ever expected to play Pun-Pun). In my experience most people have some sort of conception of their character and what they can do - an expectation guided by the game they are playing. And it's this sense of betrayal at there being a broken promise, combined with the fact that there is something you can do to get the character you were promised that leads to some forms of munchkin behaviour. This, incidentally, is something used by a lot of modern RPGs - when people don't feel they are fighting the rules to do what they want what they want tends to be relatively modest so you don't actually need rules to rein them in for this.

Did you cut-and-paste this from a previous post? It sounds like I've read this before.

 

[S'mon]

3.X (definitely including PF) on the other hand appears to promise you a big damn hero. Which means that when you die as a chump the game itself betrayed you. Also characters in 3.X can easily take half an hour to build between the thirty something skills on the skill list, the dozen or so spells the wizard gets (or whatever the cleric is preparing), feat selection, and everything else, which makes creating a replacement character a whole lot more obnoxious than it was in 1e.

...

Also a mismatch between expectation and reality is, in my experience, the single biggest driver for hardcore character optimisation that isn't simply a game played for the fun of it (no one ever expected to play Pun-Pun). In my experience most people have some sort of conception of their character and what they can do - an expectation guided by the game they are playing. And it's this sense of betrayal at there being a broken promise, combined with the fact that there is something you can do to get the character you were promised that leads to some forms of munchkin behaviour. This, incidentally, is something used by a lot of modern RPGs - when people don't feel they are fighting the rules to do what they want what they want tends to be relatively modest so you don't actually need rules to rein them in for this.

Yup, I agree strongly. As you know I houseruled the PF campaign we're starting tomorrow
to hopefully make it less randomly lethal - more starting hp, lowered crit damage, better
saves at high level, easier death saves - and we'll see if that makes a difference. It should hopefully lower the random lethality to something closer to 1e, anyway - at high level 3e was much
more randomly lethal than 1e IME.