WoTC_krg posts on game design theory

[Goobermunch]

Was he a mathematician? If he was, they didn't hire him solely as that, so my point still stands.

I don't see how anything I said contradicts that. In fact, the fact that they are not resting on their laurels but instead thinking even more deeply about this edition that the previous one would seem to bear that out.


glass.

Actually, they hired him because he'd come up with an extremely intriguing, well designed little card game. I think it was called Magic, or something.

See, he used his skills as a mathematician to develop the game.

Prior to doing that he was just a professor at a liberal arts college.

--G

 

[FadedC]

I kid of assumed that is what he meant.

He isn't sure that they are balancing it so the classes help the overall goal of fun and a successful adventure an equal amount, but that they may be being balanced in deathmatch style ways.

Can't say that is what the designers are doing or not, but I see plenty of players saying my X class should be able to defeat your Y class 50% of the time, like D&d was some PVP game.

Hmm....well I haven't seen anything at all from the designers to suggest they are using deathmatch pvp as a means to balance classes, but they have written articles about the importance of balancing them from a fun/succesful adventure standpoint. So I think it should be pretty obvious what they mean.

I would agree though that if by some bizarre chance they were trying to balance every class in terms of it's ability to kill the other classes in one on one combat, then that would be silly. But I'm fairly sure that is not the case.

 

[D.Shaffer]

Actually, I dont think balancing them with PvP in mind is completely unwarranted. It's entirely likely that NPCs can still get PC Class levels and they'll need to ensure that it's still balanced when the PC's go against classed NPCs.

Additionally, while most groups seem to hate it when it happens, intra-party conflicts do crop up now and then.