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Author Topic: The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)  (Read 27560 times)

Lord Mistborn
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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #15 on: August 31, 2012, 09:25:00 AM »
Quote from: Exploderwizard;578611
In a roleplaying game, people just might want to play a character in a setting with a particular flavor. Part of that setting might be that there are those who perform magic and thus do things that are MAGICAL. Not every player wants a magical character and is perfectly happy playing one that isn't magic focused.

The whole "can't contribute" meme is load of steaming shit unless you have a lobotomized ape playing the character. Players should matter. The person at the table is more important than what is scribbled on a sheet. If what you can do in a game begins and ends with whats on the character sheet then the game is nothing more than a pile of rules. Such games are full of fail as roleplaying games.


So the long knives come out, I wish this was a surprise. Tell me exactly how does, a balanced game takes the magic out of peoples characters or stifles player creativity.
Quote from: Me;576460
As much as this debacle of a thread has been an embarrassment for me personally (and it has ^_^' ). I salute you mister unintelligible troll guy. You ran as far to the extreme as possible on the anti-3e thing and Benoist still defended you against my criticism. Good job.

MGuy

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #16 on: August 31, 2012, 09:35:56 AM »
Quote from: Lord Mistborn;578620
So the long knives come out, I wish this was a surprise. Tell me exactly how does, a balanced game takes the magic out of peoples characters or stifles player creativity.


Better question. How does being a character with "magic" stuff on your character sheet force you to use those magical abilities?
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Finally a thread about fighters!

Exploderwizard

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #17 on: August 31, 2012, 09:43:23 AM »
Quote from: Lord Mistborn;578620
So the long knives come out, I wish this was a surprise. Tell me exactly how does, a balanced game takes the magic out of peoples characters or stifles player creativity.


Who mentioned taking the magic out of anything? Balance can shoehorn it IN where it isn't wanted. (4E fighter powers come to mind), from a desire to make sure that all characters are equally capable no matter if its appropriate to the setting or not.

Player creativity thrives in environments where everything isn't nailed down to a die roll or chosen from a list.

Simply put, the more the question "what do you do?" cannot be answered meaningfully without choosing something from the character sheet, the less interest I have in playing.
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MGuy

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #18 on: August 31, 2012, 09:47:10 AM »
Quote from: Exploderwizard;578630
Simply put, the more the question "what do you do?" cannot be answered meaningfully without choosing something from the character sheet, the less interest I have in playing.

Did you post this not realizing how little sense it makes? I can tell you what every character I've ever played did without referencing the character sheet I used (which I most likely don't have) in every game system from every game I've ever played in. What exactly does this expectation have to do with anything?
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Finally a thread about fighters!

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #19 on: August 31, 2012, 09:51:57 AM »
Quote from: Lord Mistborn;578620
So the long knives come out, I wish this was a surprise. Tell me exactly how does, a balanced game takes the magic out of peoples characters or stifles player creativity.


Please check the bottom paragraph or so of my previous post, already mentioned it in passing.

And you'll find your stay here much more pleasantl if you lay off the "long knives come out" persecution complex. All the 3etards and 4vengers do the damn thing every time someone offends them by daring to not drink their favourite flavour of Kool-Aid. You should be better than that.
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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #20 on: August 31, 2012, 10:01:24 AM »
Quote from: Lord Mistborn;578581
So a lot of bile has been spewed on this forum over the issue of class balance. It is my opinion that a system with classes need to have those classes balanced against each other in some manner.

So what is balance. Let's start with what's not balance.

This sentence didn't do you any favors. You really should have expected people to misunderstand because it isn't really clear.

Quote
-Imbalance by Level. If the wizard class is weak at low levels and unstoppable at high levels and the fighter is awesome at low levels and loses steam at high levels. This isn't balance because 90% of the time people won't progress enough to see it. If you know for sure that the campaign is not going to last until high levels then you lose nothing by being a fighter. If the game is staring at a higher level then you lose comparatively less or nothing by being a wizard.

This really depends on the pace of leveling, the point at which things cross from unbalanced to balanced to unbalanced the other way, and whether the gap continues to widen at the top.

Quote
-Role protection. If the party needs a fighter, wizard, priest, and thief to get through that dungon than the classes are balanced right? Wrong. Not only dose the paradigm tend to railroad players into a class the don't want to play but unless each classes thing comes up an equal share of the time then some people are contributing more and some people are contributing less.

To give and example, imagine that there is a class called the Lame Guy. He has the worst saves and worst thaco/bab/whatever and no class features but the ability to kill the dreaded fuckoffsaurus instantly at will. This is the only way to deal with a fuckoffsaurus so someone needs to play the Lame Guy if the party is on any adventure that might involve the beasts. The thing is if 95% of the time the Lame Guy's niche is irrelevant than his player isn't going to have any fun. On the other hand if slaying fuckoffsaurus is not properly role protected (say the wizard researches the spell slay fuckoffsaurus) then the class is completely useless.

So what is balance. This is my definition of balance.

Niche protection wasn't as strong in the oldest editions. A wizard would open a door with a spell, a rogue would with lockpicks, and a fighter would with strength. People talk about the wizard stepping on everybody's toes, but everybody did everything (ish). And this was intentional. At least in the core of the game which was that low level dungeon crawling.

In any case, no one was really barred from or specialized in the general stuff the game had. Everyone could try to deal with traps, puzzles, monsters, hidden doors, wilderness travel, etc. They just each used different tools for the job.

The truth is that people on both sides of this argument get confused about whether or not they want niche protection or how strong they want it. Here's you (maybe) arguing that niche protection isn't balance and at the same time people complain that the fighter doesn't have his own thing (because everybody fights).

Quote
-SGT 50%. The Same Game Test measures the ability of a class to complete level appropriate challenges. The idea is that when presented with a list of potential challenges a party could face than that character would solve 50% of them. If a class can't score 50% on the test it need to be beefed up, if a class is scoring say 100% then it need to be toned down. The SGT is not an exact science but I feel the it's a good marker for how a class preforms.

Actually, in a game where the party can proactively choose its challenges, the party might find something like SGT regardless of whether it was baked in (or might favor the class of the most proactive player, which strikes me as more likely).

Old school gaming posits a world of mixed challenge levels, exploration, decisions to fight or flee, etc. As such it kind of finds its own balance point via that feedback in play.

The main issue the old-schoolers on this board have with the concept of level-appropriateness is that it smacks of having the GM "provide" challenges at that level. And you can see based on the previous two paragraphs why that would be a problem, right?

_______________________________

Otherwise, I agree. None of the above are necessarily balance.

Sacrosanct

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #21 on: August 31, 2012, 10:15:32 AM »
Trying to balance each character with each other using each other class as a measuring stick in games like D&D is faulty.  Games like that should never have that as a goal because games like that aren't designed for character classes to face off in a thunderdome style of play.  

Games like D&D are team games.  The goal for balance should be, "In a particular game session, did everyone feel like they contributed roughly equally."

Not, "In every scenario in the game session,..."  I.e., you can easily have balance and niche protection at the same time.

If you try to make everyone equal at every scenario, you end up having all the characters the same, but with a different coat of paint, so to speak.  I.e., the mechanical result is the same, but with just different names on how you got there.  Then it just becomes meh.  If everyone is special, no one is.
D&D is not an "everyone gets a ribbon" game.  If you're stupid, your PC will die.  If you're an asshole, your PC will die (probably from the other PCs).  If you're unlucky, your PC may die.  Point?  PC's die.  Get over it and roll up a new one.

Exploderwizard

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #22 on: August 31, 2012, 10:30:59 AM »
Quote from: Sacrosanct;578646
Games like D&D are team games.  The goal for balance should be, "In a particular game session, did everyone feel like they contributed roughly equally."



Not even this sometimes. If I am playing a thief in a B/X game and a particular session involved a great deal of combat, then I wouldn't expect to contribute equally. The fighter, fights better (duh :)) so I would say he contributed more in that particular instance.

In the next session we end up exploring a trap filled tomb with few monsters and I get to contribute more in that session.

I really think the crux of the whole issue is people hanging all their fun strictly on their mechanical contributions for the session. When I began playing this wasn't an issue and we were 10 year old kids. Have attention spans really gotten THAT much shorter in the past 30-odd years?
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Gamers, as a whole, are much like primitive cavemen when confronted with a new game. Rather than 'oh, neat, what's this do?', the reaction is to decide if it's a sex hole, then hit it with a rock.

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At some point it seems like D&D is going to disappear up its own ass.

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In the randomness of the dice lies the seed for the great oak of creativity and fun. The great virtue of the dice is that they come without boxed text.

Sacrosanct

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #23 on: August 31, 2012, 10:56:11 AM »
Quote from: Exploderwizard;578647
Not even this sometimes. If I am playing a thief in a B/X game and a particular session involved a great deal of combat, then I wouldn't expect to contribute equally. The fighter, fights better (duh :)) so I would say he contributed more in that particular instance.

In the next session we end up exploring a trap filled tomb with few monsters and I get to contribute more in that session.

I really think the crux of the whole issue is people hanging all their fun strictly on their mechanical contributions for the session. When I began playing this wasn't an issue and we were 10 year old kids. Have attention spans really gotten THAT much shorter in the past 30-odd years?


Well, yeah.  But my gaming sessions tend to be 8-10 hours long, so we rarely  have one where there isn't all three of the three pillars in there somewhere.  But if you're only playing for a couple hours I can see where one session might be combat heavy and another not, and I'm perfectly OK with that.
D&D is not an "everyone gets a ribbon" game.  If you're stupid, your PC will die.  If you're an asshole, your PC will die (probably from the other PCs).  If you're unlucky, your PC may die.  Point?  PC's die.  Get over it and roll up a new one.

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #24 on: August 31, 2012, 12:14:38 PM »
Dungeons and Dragons is a very imbalanced game, especially in regards to classes.

In 1st Edition, the classes were intentionally designed to be more/less powerful than each other at different levels.  Low-level Magic-Users were designed to be very weak in the beginning, but really powerful at high levels.  Fighters, conversely, had more staying power at low levels but got eclipsed in power later on in the campaign.

I don't think that this premise worked out as intended; a low-level Magic-User with the right spells is a glass cannon (weak but packs a powerful punch) with certain spells, such as charm person.  As for having things equalize by giving everyone there moment to shine at certain points, there's no guarantee that a campaign will go from 1st to 14th, or even 22nd level.  The Magic-User's power was an in-game reward to long-term group play.

I'm not fond of this idea; sometimes I like to run one-shots or short campaigns, and sometimes I want the starting point of a game to be at a higher level of power.

3rd Edition is incredibly unbalanced, even with just the Core books.  Ever heard of CoDzilla?  It destroys niche protection!  A Cleric can be a better necromancer than the Necromancer and melee better than the Fighter.  And let's not forget that "trap options" were intentionally designed into the system via Ivory Tower Game Design.  Fighters and martial characters, whether by feat or prestige classes, got niche abilities less useful than a stock assortment of spells most of the time.

4th Edition was an attempt to make a balanced game, and in comparison to 1st and 3rd it IS more balanced.  But supplement bloat and bad early design of skill challenges worked against it.  Also, certain builds can be vastly more powerful than others (there's a way to get a Swordmage to rely on Intelligence for everything).  I don't know much more about the mechanics of the system, so a 4th Edition expert can chime in.

Since D&D's a combat-heavy and rules-heavy game in most of its incarnations, having hard-and-fast rules for class powers is necessary.  And every class needs ways to contribute both inside and outside of combat.

My ideas for solutions:

Give Mundanes nice things: We've all heard of the dreaded scenario when a flying monster forces the Fighter to rely on a bow he can't use well at all, a monster's blindsight/super-senses foiling a Thief's Stealth check, or spells invalidating entire skills.  Sometimes the Wizard dies from a well-placed critical hit, and the Cleric's been afflicted with some eternal sleeping curse.  The amount of enemies in D&D which can fly, ignore non-magical attacks, and otherwise bypass mundanes is immense.  A party without spellcasters should not be irreversibly boned when fighting other casters and most types of monsters.  If we're going to leave spellcasters with a big toolbox of mobility, combat, and ranged spells, then Fighters, Barbarians, Thieves, and other noncasters need abilities of useful equivalency independent of DM Fiat to contribute to the party.

Also, realism and the laws of physics have no place in D&D, especially when they just apply to noncasters.

Role Protection: Every class role, mundane or magical, needs to do unique things that the other roles cannot do.  Fighters, Thieves, and noncasters should have innate abilities which can't be replicated by spells.

There should also be restriction on magic, and the idea of "themed casters" is a good idea, like what they did with the Dread Necromancer and Beguiler in 3rd Edition; the Necromancer was good with the undead, but screwed when it came to replicating illusion and divination magic.

D&D's a team game:  A good team has particular strengths and skills to aid the party's performance and cover up weaknesses.  This means that everything should be capable of contributing and that common enemy tactics shouldn't invalidate entire classes.  Classes/abilities which are useless more than 50% of the time pull the rest of the party down and hurt everyone's survival rates.

There's an infinite power loop, that's okay:Many games are chock-full of rules exploits and cheesy combos, and D&D is no stranger to these sorts of shenanigans.  Ideally, these things will be few and far between; but just because they exist does not mean that the game's irredeemable; on the contrary, a lot of the ones in D&D require excessive number-crunching beyond routine optimization and ruin the fun for everybody else in the game.  If you manage to stumble upon it accidentally, I don't think anybody would complain if the group "retconned" things down to a more reasonable level.  I realize that I'm arguing in favor of DM Fiat in extreme cases of unstoppable power, because it never ends well for anybody.

Magical Tea Party will always exist:  As I mentioned right before, DM Fiat can be good in some cases.  Except when it comes to core conceits about the game or things which happen with regularity; we wouldn't want to pay money for a war game that has no rules for mass combat.  DM Fiat should not serve as an end-all be-all solution to class imbalance.  Ideally every class can stand on its own without the DM swooping in to fix things.

But there's always going to be things that the rules don't cover.  I don't think that the game is enhanced with extraneous details for things which may never come up in most games, such as rules for an intricate economic system.  How do you calculate the gp value of wooden arrows in a desert region X miles away from a forest, or factor the precise standards of living from an emerging middle class in an industrial society?  Details on these things can add to the world and represent change and interesting adventure hooks, but it's fine for the DM to say "the orcs took over the mines, meaning that metal goods are up 200%" instead of busting out a huge stack of text to calculate the value of forged iron by the pound based on hundreds of factors.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2012, 12:52:09 PM by Libertad »

MGuy

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #25 on: August 31, 2012, 12:36:54 PM »
Quote from: Exploderwizard;578647
Not even this sometimes. If I am playing a thief in a B/X game and a particular session involved a great deal of combat, then I wouldn't expect to contribute equally. The fighter, fights better (duh :)) so I would say he contributed more in that particular instance.

In the next session we end up exploring a trap filled tomb with few monsters and I get to contribute more in that session.

I really think the crux of the whole issue is people hanging all their fun strictly on their mechanical contributions for the session. When I began playing this wasn't an issue and we were 10 year old kids. Have attention spans really gotten THAT much shorter in the past 30-odd years?

Let's look at this as critically as we can here because this is important. Exactly what makes "being a fighter" more effective than "being a thief" in combat? What exactly about "being a thief" makes you better at finding traps?
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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #26 on: August 31, 2012, 12:39:38 PM »
Quote from: Libertad;578680
Since D&D's a combat-heavy and rules-heavy game in most of its incarnations, having hard-and-fast rules for class powers is necessary.  


:rotfl:
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Gamers, as a whole, are much like primitive cavemen when confronted with a new game. Rather than 'oh, neat, what's this do?', the reaction is to decide if it's a sex hole, then hit it with a rock.

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At some point it seems like D&D is going to disappear up its own ass.

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Exploderwizard

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #27 on: August 31, 2012, 12:44:50 PM »
Quote from: MGuy;578689
Let's look at this as critically as we can here because this is important. Exactly what makes "being a fighter" more effective than "being a thief" in combat? What exactly about "being a thief" makes you better at finding traps?


I will counter with : what makes not being as effective equal to the inability to contribute?
Quote from: JonWake
Gamers, as a whole, are much like primitive cavemen when confronted with a new game. Rather than 'oh, neat, what's this do?', the reaction is to decide if it's a sex hole, then hit it with a rock.

Quote from: Old Geezer;724252
At some point it seems like D&D is going to disappear up its own ass.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;766997
In the randomness of the dice lies the seed for the great oak of creativity and fun. The great virtue of the dice is that they come without boxed text.

Libertad

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #28 on: August 31, 2012, 12:59:11 PM »
Since people are talking about every edition of D&D in these game balance threads, I think that we can get a lot more discussion out of this and better clarification if people are clear about which edition they're talking about, which editions they have extensive experience with, and which edition sourcebooks they have access to.

When one guy's debating and uses edition X as an example, it doesn't help clarify things for posters whose only experience is with edition Y.

I'll start by saying that I have extensive experience with 3rd Edition.  I have not played 1st Edition, but I have the three core books on me (the Reprints).  I have limited experience with 4th Edition, but I do not have the core books on me.  I do not own, and have no experience with, 2nd Edition, Original D&D, or the Mentzer/BX/BECMI rulesets.

Since things changed a lot between editions, it might be best if we had separate game balanced threads dedicated to different editions of D&D.  Otherwise people will continually use examples from sourcebooks that a large portion of involved posters do not own.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2012, 01:18:22 PM by Libertad »

Exploderwizard

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The class balance thread (let's try to keep this one trolling free)
« Reply #29 on: August 31, 2012, 01:12:40 PM »
Access to:
OD&D & Supplements
Holmes Basic
Moldvay B/X
Mentzer BECM (never bothered with Immortals)
AD&D 1E
AD&D 2E and early splat
3E core and some splat
3.5E and some splat
4E core and some splat
4E Essentials

Most actual playtime goes to AD&D 1E and Moldvay B/X
Quote from: JonWake
Gamers, as a whole, are much like primitive cavemen when confronted with a new game. Rather than 'oh, neat, what's this do?', the reaction is to decide if it's a sex hole, then hit it with a rock.

Quote from: Old Geezer;724252
At some point it seems like D&D is going to disappear up its own ass.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;766997
In the randomness of the dice lies the seed for the great oak of creativity and fun. The great virtue of the dice is that they come without boxed text.