D&D 4E Will the 4E classes be deliberately unbalanced to get players to read?

[Ridley's Cohort]

This grognard is skeptical.

"System Mastery" is just a lame excuse for poor design and needless complication.

Any system half as complex as 1e/2e/3e will have inevitably have significant System Mastery elements, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill.

On second thought, it could be that the designers who came up with that lame idea just never mastered any game that was actually complicated or difficult.

 

[FadedC]

"System Mastery" is just a lame excuse for poor design and needless complication.

Any system half as complex as 1e/2e/3e will have inevitably have significant System Mastery elements, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill.

On second thought, it could be that the designers who came up with that lame idea just never mastered any game that was actually complicated or difficult.

The idea comes from magic, where it was used to good effect. Weither it should be part of D&D is another matter entirely (I would say no).

 

[NaturalZero]

Most of 3E's system mastery issues were due to how interconnected things were, not simply the intentional inclusion of "timmy choices". You had "normal" melee attacks but you could stack ability A from a feat, ability B from a class ability, ability C from an item and so on, to do enough damage to down a tarrasque. Likewise, you could find ways of stacking metamagic after metamagic onto one spell until you were dealing thousands of points of damage. 4E seems to be nixing this design paradigm by compartmentalizing things. It doesnt seem like your really going to be able to stack multiple feats, powers and other buffs into your offense ive abilities because each of the attack powers is self contained.

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

It doesnt seem like your really going to be able to stack multiple feats, powers and other buffs into your offense ive abilities because each of the attack powers is self contained.

Which seems to be what makes 4E awesome.

 

[AtomicPope]

...I say make the character you'd like to be, and play them the way you think is fun.

I think this is a major problem in roleplaying. Players shouldn't make anything they want to be. Gygax said, in Role-Playing Mastery, many players end up going down the wrong road of Role Assumption or acting out a role they wish to assume (real or feigned). The problem this leads to is the game becoming too personal at the risk of enjoyment.

It's like that person who always plays the same character. It's just no fun for anyone else.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

It's impossible to make every choice of equal value. But at least you can make various character build balanced against each other, and within these build you can make the 'high Value' choices more numerous and intuitive than they were in 3e.

Example : There is this racial Giant Fighting dwarven feat that gives you +1 to AC and Reflex against Large creature.

Is it a good choice? Well, if you are dwarven ranger using a crossbow... not really. If you are a fighter always on the front line, than hell yes. But this is fairly intuitive, no need of a D&D degree to realize that a class that gets targeted by Large creatures about 5x more often that another will get about 5x more use out of the feat.

Yet rules mastery hasn't been entirely wiped out even in that example ; It takes a little experience that a newbie might not have to know that this is a bad feat to take on level 1. You should pick it up a few level later when you are being faced by Lage creature on a routine basis.

But if we can really retrain feat, than it's no big deal.

 

[DandD]

Role-Playing Mastery? What's that supposed to mean?

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Gygax said, in Role-Playing Mastery,

Gygax said a lot of things. Simply because he said it doesn't mean it is true in all things.

 

[AtomicPope]

Most of 3E's system mastery issues were due to how interconnected things were, not simply the intentional inclusion of "timmy choices". You had "normal" melee attacks but you could stack ability A from a feat, ability B from a class ability, ability C from an item and so on, to do enough damage to down a tarrasque. Likewise, you could find ways of stacking metamagic after metamagic onto one spell until you were dealing thousands of points of damage. 4E seems to be nixing this design paradigm by compartmentalizing things. It doesnt seem like your really going to be able to stack multiple feats, powers and other buffs into your offense ive abilities because each of the attack powers is self contained.

Which is much better for the game.

I can min/max with the best of them. I'm a very competant mathematician and analyst (I worked as an 0261 in the Corps) and I realize how quickly 3e could get out of hand with a bit of number crunching. The problem with feats and class features overlapping in terms of overall ability is the larger a the system became (the height of 3.5) the more out of control it became.

It's very easy in 3e to create characters that can dish out 500-1000pts of damage in a single round to a single target. Players think it's only fair if they are the broken elements in the game. But GM's are allowed to use the same feats and class features for monsters. When players face the "Rival NPC Party" one the them will end up in a TPK. Because 3e was so out of hand, most of the time a PC Party would suffer several deaths at the hand of a Rival NPC group just because the damage output was way too high.

This speaks to the mathematical flaw of the CR system in general. A single NPC class was one CR lower than their class total. This is fundamentally flawed. It suggests that all classes are equal (in 3e they are not). One warmage or sorcerer with appropriate gear, feats, and features can immolate an entire PC group in a single surprise round. But at the same time, many monsters cannot.


This list of inconsistencies in 3e could go on forever. Both as a player and as a DM I'm glad they're finally creating a unified system that has standards which applies to all classes equally.

 

[robertliguori]

*shrugs*
A complex system with the potential for synergy will have more-balanced and less-balanced options. I'd personally love to see a M&MM-style explicit power guideline built into the rules, such that you can consult a table and determine that a level 6 striker should have AC, HPs, attack/average damage values, and so forth, as well as additional elements (number of healing surges, mobility or stealth tricks, etc.) that are expected. As it stands, I am reasonably sure that you will get optimizers zeroing in on optimal synergies between separate elements, or exploiting assumptions to gain a persistent edge. For instance, a party that was leader, defender, defender, defender and used its magic items to focus on mobility and reducing vulnerability to ranged attacks looks very much like it can bring the smack down on expected 4E encounters by whittling down foes and relying on its far-above-average ability to soak damage.

4E looks to have the assumption that people will try to optimize built into it; I find this a welcome change. In the ideal case, of course, there will be a notable cost to a non-optimized character, and a noticeable benefit to an optimized one, but neither will render the character unbalanced.