Quote from: Benoist;376208If you understand the term "game balance" with the bent it took in 3.x up to 4e, sure.
It can only be such a thread.

Really?  Because 3.x to 4e was when the "character optimization" communities kicked in, and "character builds" began to rule all...and I checked out of D&D altogether.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;376248Really?  Because 3.x to 4e was when the "character optimization" communities kicked in, and "character builds" began to rule all...and I checked out of D&D altogether.

To me, "game balance" is a completely different animal than "rules balance", the latter being what WotC refers to when they're using the former. Quoting myself from ENWorld:

QuoteGame balance is actually something different than Rules balance, where the former is the act of balancing the game as it is being played at an actual game table, versus the latter which balances the mechanical elements used in this game and written on paper.

Some amount of Rules balance in a game is a commandable goal. It ensures that players have choices to play the characters they want, and yet do not get a mechanical upper hand that would rob other players from their own thunder. That's all fine and good.

Game balance does not solely rely on Rules balance to happen, though.

Good communication and cooperation between the participants in the game, whether DM and/or players, is paramount. There's a informal rule for this: "don't be a dick". Don't rob other players from their moments to shine, cooperate with them, don't try to be the best at everything all the time, don't try to break the rules on purpose... these kinds of things are part of the Social aspect of the game. No amount of rules in the world will ever be able to stop some selfish player to break the game or spoil it for the others involved if he just wants to.

There's also the way the DM uses the rules and challenges specific characters. If a character is noticeably more powerful than some other character(s) in the group, it makes sense for enemies knowing the party's layout to want to take that powerful guy out first, to make him the target of powerful spells and ranged attacks, etc. It should not happen all the time of course, but it completely makes sense, as the characters rise in the world, for the world to react to their specific makeup, attitudes, powers, and so on, so forth.

There's obviously more to it than this, but really, the bottom line simply is: Rules balance should not be substituted for Game balance. Some amount of fairness and relatively equal choices in the game's design is good, and beneficial to the game. Obsessing over the "fairness" of choices on the written page, and thus reducing, limiting these choices while exponentially increasing the game's codification and complexity to reach some theoretical "fairness" on said page, is not.

It is all in the excluded middle, to me, here: some amount of Rules balance is fine; Mistaking Rules balance for Game balance isn't.

But even if we are talking about "rules balance" here, rules balance is scripted according to a given context, a big picture that informs the decisions as to the balance of this versus that character type, and how to create a basis of game balance through their write-ups in the rules. The way these games understand the context of game play is vastly different. Where you have multiple characters, hirelings and henchmen in one game, you'll have one character, one player, and a team-combo effect relating to "encounter" game units. Just as an example. These games all were based on different assumptions and different types of logical interpretations of game play.

Hence, comparing races from one game to the next without considering the wider context of what the game's context was, and what assumptions informed their designs, is pointless and leads to misguided conclusions (i.e. "Humans in 4e are the most balanced humans D&D has ever seen!").

Quote from: Benoist;376260(i.e. "Humans in 4e are the most balanced humans D&D has ever seen!").

Exactly. If 4e were D&D, it still wouldn't be true, since the lack of level limits in early editions is a pretty strong equalizer.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;376196Y'know, for me (and this is only half on topic, sorry), but I always thought it made more sense to give humans multiclassing and demihumans dualclassing.

It just made more sense to me that a human would try to juggle a couple of different pursuits, whereas an elf would get bored being a Mage after a while and decide to spice things up with some thievery (and so on).

Anyone ever play with the Humanoids Handbook and the awesome races (like orcs) who had an even smaller lifespan than humans?

I made the point about giving multi-classing to humans in the other thread.

It would seem to be an easy way to reposition the balance between humans and demi-humans at lower levels and reflect the whole humans are the adaptable felxible race that learn new things quickly etc.

Quote from: jibbajibba;376277I made the point about giving multi-classing to humans in the other thread.

It would seem to be an easy way to reposition the balance between humans and demi-humans at lower levels and reflect the whole humans are the adaptable felxible race that learn new things quickly etc.

Maybe remove the penalty for using the old class while dual classing?

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;376248Really?  Because 3.x to 4e was when the "character optimization" communities kicked in...

I agree, but I think it has more to do with the development of the Internet and social communities than the game. It seems to me that late 2e had aggregated mechanical differences to make deeper optimization possible (people have been selecting certain weapons, spells, magic items, etc., since the inception of the game as they represent a kind of shallow optimization).

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;376389I agree, but I think it has more to do with the development of the Internet and social communities than the game. It seems to me that late 2e had aggregated mechanical differences to make deeper optimization possible (people have been selecting certain weapons, spells, magic items, etc., since the inception of the game as they represent a kind of shallow optimization).

Seanchai

Well, now, that is a very valid point.  When I ran AD&D2e, I sure did see a lot of common weapons and spells pop up.  Not so much on the magic items as I never had anything resembling a magic item shop, and I tended to use random tables a lot (unless there was something I was really interested on adding to the campaign).

2E wasn't the same as 3E or 4E in terms of optimization. 3E and 4E tend to put all aspects of character generation and progression under the players control. Point buy for stats and significant player control over magical items, for example. Most of optimization/powergaming in 1E/2E invoved getting high stats and powerful magic items, which the players didn't have much control over. "Munchkinism" was more prevalent, as becoming more powerful was more about cheating and bullying the DM as opposed to making smart choices.

Quote from: StormBringer;376313Maybe remove the penalty for using the old class while dual classing?

We did this already and it helps but the stat restrictions on dual classing are so huge its a rare one. 15 in the primary of the first class 17 in the second class is really uncommon. There is an old trick start as a fighter with 15 Str and 17 Int run to second level then switch to  Magic User. If you remove the dual class restriction you get a wizard who can user armour and swords. Now I have to say a dual classed guy who has to remove his armour to cast spells when the Elven Fighter/MU doesn't need to is hard to defend but there is a loop hole here and the stat restiction is your only defend which means the high stat PC is onto a double advantage. I rolled great stats and now as well as that advantage I can also get these advantages.... its a double win. We played it that way but a couple of PCs were highly advantaged by it.

In retrospect I think getting rid of all multi-class/dual class is a better option and replacing with a class builder so if you want to play a fighter magic user the DM uses the class-builder to build a hybrid class that is  a fighter with spells or a wizard that can fight but the class is built in a template and is balanced as an effect (although it will probably end up lookin like a bard with no theif skills and a d8 hd).

Hey, at least we've agreed 4e hoo-mans aren't balanced in any sense. Off to the new topic:

I have to concede the internet has changed gaming alot; now when I play a game, even a boardgame, I can go online in seconds and learn optimal strategies and flaws in the rules. When I go and look what is said about old games, I realize I would have played those old games VERY differently if I had that info back then.

That said, 3E Dungeons and Dragons and 4E/Magic Sword both have 'build' as a concept. When you create your character at level 1, you can know exactly what you intend for that character at level 15. You know the stats, the feats, the magic items, pretty much everything. This is far more true in 4e, since you also know the hit points, and your character isn't really intended to interact with a game world, and thus need not concern himself with aging, followers, and that sort of stuff, although still you have 'builds' in 3e that generally are resistant to game-world events.



In 2E or whatever, this was simply not possible. Your character was not a 'build' with an entire destiny mapped from birth, it was a character that developed over time almost entirely through interaction with a fantasy world, and characters often adapted as they leveled to the changing circumstances (eg, finding a powerful magical trident might cause a character to change his favorite weapon, not possible at all in 4e, and often difficult in 3e).

Interesting. 3e comparatively has more 'options' as characters level, which is why there's a build. Unless your character is capable of dual classing in 2nd Ed, they're made all of their essential choices at first level (class, race). At level-1  what you'll get at every level up from then on is pretty much set, aside from proficiencies.
I'm not necessarily defending builds here, they're annoying, but I think they're a product of choice, which is (generally speaking) a good thing. The problem in 3 was that feature X needs feature Y to work and then meshes mechanically with feature Z, and then some sometimes bizarre option is often the best.

Well, players made all the choices they *could* at level 1, but other choices would come up later in play.

Early modules and adventures often had "if the character does this, he gains such and such ability", or would need to make a choice (save the princess, or save her brother) that would have an impact on the character.

I use White Plume Mountain as an example. The players could get magic items there, and in 'old' D&D, the players could actually use those items, one of which being a magical trident.

In 3e, or especially 4e? The characters would have to have built their characters from the ground up to use Wave...otherwise, they'd just be 'gimped', and so wouldn't touch the thing. There are actually quite a few other adventures that you just can't have in 4e because of this (among fundamental design issues), and a few of those would likely be problematic in 3e as well.

Well, how excited would King Arthur be if he'd been given Excalibur and it was a lucerne hammer?

I have seen 3.5 characters use non-build-optimal weapons - particularly in high level games when artifacts and super weapons start to appear. I had a dwarf hammer-and-axe fighter in another game who was using evil soulsucking bladed gauntlets for awhile (until they were prised off him and we found a way of actually destroying them), and in another game running currently our bastard-sword-fighting paladin was clinging on desperately to his Dragonlance.

I'm not convinced this is definitively not a problem in older editions, though, either - late 1e had double specialization, later versions of Basic had weapon mastery, and 2E had weapon specialization and fighter's handbook weapon styles, so you could probably still gimp yourself reasonably well given half a chance (up to 3 or 4 weapon proficiency slots down the drain). Plus, a 2E character is more likely to have a nonproficiency penalty with a weird weapon, since they don't get global proficiency in all simple or all martial weapons.

Whether or not he's technically right at this time, isn't Doom (on page 1) essentially right?

That with 4e, on account of its "everything is Core" mentality, obliging GMs to use everything WoTC ever whims to publish, it will be inevitable that the Human will ultimately be a gimp choice?
Whatever humans could do, in 4e the moment they were at their very peak as a good choice for a character race was when the 4e PHB was first released. The second that anything else was released, the odds started to bring the human down, as more and more new (and remember, CORE) races came out that players could choose instead of the human.  Inevitably, these races will gradually pick away at whatever mechanical advantages humans hold over the other PC races, so that as time goes by with 4e, the presence of humans in PC groups should logically decrease fairly constantly.

And, for that matter, Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings; all of them were at their very best as an appealing choice when the PHB came out. When there are 100 CORE character races, its very unlikely that those four "classic" races will have much to make people cling to them.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;376785Whether or not he's technically right at this time, isn't Doom (on page 1) essentially right?

That with 4e, on account of its "everything is Core" mentality, obliging GMs to use everything WoTC ever whims to publish, it will be inevitable that the Human will ultimately be a gimp choice?
Whatever humans could do, in 4e the moment they were at their very peak as a good choice for a character race was when the 4e PHB was first released. The second that anything else was released, the odds started to bring the human down, as more and more new (and remember, CORE) races came out that players could choose instead of the human.  Inevitably, these races will gradually pick away at whatever mechanical advantages humans hold over the other PC races, so that as time goes by with 4e, the presence of humans in PC groups should logically decrease fairly constantly.

And, for that matter, Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings; all of them were at their very best as an appealing choice when the PHB came out. When there are 100 CORE character races, its very unlikely that those four "classic" races will have much to make people cling to them.

RPGPundit

Logically this is a sound argument. As more races come out the chances the non-specialisted human being the optimum for any class is slim. There is a caveat however which is feats. The human's free feat could become more not less powerful as new increasingly powerful feats come out but the rate of pick up of feats for other races remains flat.

Personally if I was in the driving seat I would have built all races off a costed balanced template and then given humans that free feat as a boost. This should be what they have done but I wouldn't bet on it. Also we all know -2 to one stat and +2 to another is not a balanced mechanic as the move from 16 Str to 18 has far more impact than the move from 11 Cha to 9. If you are going to use these sort of bonuses they should be costed at effect on probability basis so 17 to 18 costs an awful lot more than 10 to 11