Quote from: jibbajibba;577644You keep using wandering monsters as some great panacea of balance. In 1e if I recall you made a check once every 3 to 6 turns for an encounter with an encounter occuring 1 in 6 times so lets say you went for 1 every 3 turns that means typically you will have a single wandering monster encounter every 3 hours of play or 3 in a 9 hour adventuring day. Of those 3 encounters some will need to be avoided becuase they will be a great threat and some will be a minor annoyance others will be oportunities to trade or learn information. I would postuate that only 1 in 3 encounters results in combat. Thus we have on average 1 random encounter per day..... which acts as the ultimate balancer on those pesky wizards.....

I also said how the adventures were designed.  Or when you played AD&D, did you just have the group of bugbears across the hall ignore the party fighting orcs, and just have them wait statically for the party to rest up and enter their room?

And I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure random encounters were a lot more frequent than that.

Quote from: CRKrueger;577639Oh no, it is true, it's mathematically provable (although you'll never see the proof) and applicable in 100% of cases.  Without exception. PERIOD.

Wait... you mean not isolate every single character unto itself so it can be picked apart completely divorced from what is actually occurring in the setting and highly conditional? :eek:

The saddest thing here is seeing Mr. Improv Murder Mystery shed all intellectual integrity backing the pointwhores because Benoist and Vulmea made him ragequit once for a few weeks.  

Sorry, did I say sad, I meant hilarious.  :rotfl:

hello.... I am actually trying to put everything that might happen in a game into the pot.
just trying to help....

As I said from the start there is no balance at low levels MUs are shit and high levels they are gods.

I have no issue with it its the game its how its supposed to work, but here we get this idea that a 5th level fighter can run through 10 fights no impact on them at all, or that a 5th level fighter is as flexible as a wizard.

These are the points of intellectual dishonesty. I think smoothing the curve making low level wizards tougher, by having more spells, and high level ones weaker, less spells, and making HP recover faster balances play out a bit.

But as Brendan pointed out this is a done discussion and I am really just a bit bored at work so meh....

Ragequit was due to Ben's continued reference to "aspies" etc which I found distateful.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577625And my point is that it's not always true.

For example, you have a 5th level MU with 3 1st, 2 2nd, and 1 3rd level spell.

combat 1 the MU is more effective, but has cast his 3rd level and 1 of his first level spells

combat 2 the MU still manages to be more effective, but has cast his 2nd level and another 1st level spell

combat 3 the MU is not nearly as effective as his remaining 2 spells are useless for that particular combat scenario

combat 4 the MU is still not effective.  Sure, an opportunity to cast his last remaining 2nd level spell arises, but he took an arrow and the spell is ruined.

Combat 5-10 the MU is not really effective at all, because the fighter is still pushing out as much damage as he did in combat 1 while the MU is flinging rocks.  

the group can finally rest and the MU can re-mem his spells.  But out of 10 combats, he was only more effective for 2 of them.

bweh, everyone is dead by combat 7 at the latest because the Cleric ran out of healing around combat 5. unless these are all weak encounters at which point than yes the fighter gets to shine. If these are actually challenging encounters 3e style the the party is dead almost for sure after encounter 5 or 6 because the just used up 100% of their resources inc. hp.

It sucks hard to be a 2e Mage on an endurance run but if the mage's player is someone like me then I'm keeping my spells in reserve only using what is absolutely necessary to win the encounter. The party is still going to rest once the cleric is out of healing. Either that or the DM's makin' it rain with the consumables.

Why don't you come back when you finally understand that there was D&D before 3e, Lord Moron.  Until then, let the adults talk.

Quote from: jibbajibba;577585This is not the balance that 4e strives for.

4e Strives for balance where each class can on average produce X damage per round versus an opponent of CR XX.

I am merely saying tweaking a couple of rules so that the sweet spot of play runs from 3rd -10th level rather than from 5-8 is a good thing.

Wizards will still be weak in combat, fighters will still have more HP and deal more damage etc etc ...

Other house rules for balance and playability I recommend would be
i) give all 1st level PCs +1d6hp representing their human normal before they became a class (it makes no sense that adventuring wizards are weaker than milkmen or scribes)
ii) give Clerics d6 HP and Thieves d8 and switch their combat tables/THACO - I am in favour of 2e Priests with varied balance of spells/combat/HP but this is a simpler method that just serves to balance the classes very simply.

I am with you as I said I am no fan of "virtual" balance like the "denners" seem to advocate. Only 654 to go!:)

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577646I also said how the adventures were designed.  Or when you played AD&D, did you just have the group of bugbears across the hall ignore the party fighting orcs, and just have them wait statically for the party to rest up and enter their room?

And I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure random encounters were a lot more frequent than that.

That is the rate for Wandering monsters and I tend to imagine that the bugbears would hide, wait for the orcs or the party to win then kill whoever was left and take their stuff.
I don't really think a dungeon where there is a tribe of orcs in this room and over the corridor there are a dozen bugbears and the two groups just sit there waiting for a bunch of PCs to turn up at random one day is my thing. The party would show up all the orcs would be dead and the bugbears would probably already have all their stuff and some more space to spread out.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577651Why don't you come back when you finally understand that there was D&D before 3e, Lord Moron.  Until then, let the adults talk.

-_- I'm using 3e logic here but it is applicable to all editions. If the fighter can handle the encounter without my spells then I'm not casting any spell especially if this is 2e an I have like 5 spells tops, these are 2e spells so often they do more but that's very limited resources.

You have posited a 10 encounter workday to put spellcasters at a disadvantage. If these encounters are a real threat to the party than people will take damage or have other bad things happen to them that the cleric will need to take care of. If these 10 encounters are not a strain on party healing than they probably are not challenging. Now I think a game where the wizard is playing smash bros while the fighter grinds on kobalds might by kinda boring.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577632You can make the same argument for the MU, or even say they would die first.  Or do MUs never take any damage in your scenarios?

In your games, does the Wizard take damage in every fight?  How about the Fighter?  

If the Fighter is going toe-to-toe with melee bruisers, he's going to take hit point damage.  If the Wizard is hiding in the back away from most of the action, he may take a hit or two infrequently (either if a melee bruiser makes it to the back rank or more likely because of missile fire).  

But you can't posit the Fighter always has full hit points when you have the expectation that he trade blows with melee combatants.  

Consider a troll versus party encounter - that's almost a cliche encounter.  The troll has some nasty melee attacks, but it doesn't have any missile attacks.  In that fight, if it's challenging, we'd expect the Fighter to take some damage and the Wizard to probably avoid taking any damage.  

But the funny thing is that people who have observed this in play are accused of 'white-room theory wanking', while the people that don't think it happens are trying to use 'theory' to prove it doesn't happen...

Quote from: deadDMwalking;577666But you can't posit the Fighter always has full hit points when you have the expectation that he trade blows with melee combatants.  

That expectation replaces any that he may have about surviving to 2nd level.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577625And my point is that it's not always true.

For example, you have a 5th level MU with 3 1st, 2 2nd, and 1 3rd level spell.

combat 1 the MU is more effective, but has cast his 3rd level and 1 of his first level spells

combat 2 the MU still manages to be more effective, but has cast his 2nd level and another 1st level spell

combat 3 the MU is not nearly as effective as his remaining 2 spells are useless for that particular combat scenario

combat 4 the MU is still not effective.  Sure, an opportunity to cast his last remaining 2nd level spell arises, but he took an arrow and the spell is ruined.

Combat 5-10 the MU is not really effective at all, because the fighter is still pushing out as much damage as he did in combat 1 while the MU is flinging rocks.  

the group can finally rest and the MU can re-mem his spells.  But out of 10 combats, he was only more effective for 2 of them.

Fighters don't have infinite hit points. The nature of melee combat in particular is that you have to put yourself into harms way. Do you really think that a fighter can stay upright for 10 consecutive combat encounters? Especially when in 8 of those combats at least one of the PCs apparently made no meaningful contribution?

Fighters may not have infinite hp, but in 1E/2E they have twice the hp of a wizard; in most cases. (and a horrid save ve magic)

in 3X-4E the hp gap narrows for various reasons.


I suspect that if Fighters had good saves and literally three to five times the hp of a wizard, the wizards would not look as all powerful.

Quote from: Bill;577675Fighters may not have infinite hp, but in 1E/2E they have twice the hp of a wizard; in most cases. (and a horrid save ve magic)

in 3X-4E the hp gap narrows for various reasons.


I suspect that if Fighters had good saves and literally three to five times the hp of a wizard, the wizards would not look as all powerful.

It's not the level of hit points in 3.X that's the problem.

One of the reasons is that spellcasters can bypass hit points entirely and go for save or lose spells.  This article has an in-depth explanation about how this makes the classes grossly imbalanced.

Quote from: soviet;577673Fighters don't have infinite hit points. The nature of melee combat in particular is that you have to put yourself into harms way. Do you really think that a fighter can stay upright for 10 consecutive combat encounters? Especially when in 8 of those combats at least one of the PCs apparently made no meaningful contribution?

Once again, are you assuming MUs never get attacked?

Seriously folks, if you really want to bring in hp as a limited resource, then the MU gets screwed even further because he's probably the #1 target by an intelligent enemy, and a 5th level MU at 13 hp won't make it long enough to use his spells in the first place.

that's why hp are irrelevant to this discussion.  If the MU happened to memorize the proper spells for the particular scenario at hand, then they are probably more effective than a fighter for just a limited amount of time while the fighter has no such limitations on attacks per round, damage output, etc.

It's like saying that a car going 100mph for up to an hour racing against a car going 75mph for 4 hours is the best.  Yeah, if your races are all under 100 miles.

Quote from: Libertad;577679It's not the level of hit points in 3.X that's the problem.

One of the reasons is that spellcasters can bypass hit points entirely and go for save or lose spells.  This article has an in-depth explanation about how this makes the classes grossly imbalanced.

Save or dies spells do not make HP unimportant.

Many of those spells simply do not effect many enemies as well.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;577682Once again, are you assuming MUs never get attacked?

No, but I'm assuming fighters get attacked more.

Unless he's just plinking away with a longbow, the fighter needs to get into melee before he can really do his thing. That means potentially crossing the battlefield in the face of missile fire. It means negotiating potential reach attacks, auras, and attacks of opportunity. And above all else it probably means that the other monsters can now get to him and smack him around at the same time. Further, 'run in and one-shot the monster' is rarely a viable strategy due to HP totals. So even if the fighter carefully positions himself against a single target, he's still got a few more rounds of toe-to-toe exchanges before he wins. Each exchange, there's a good chance he loses some more hit points. This is much worse in 3e and 4e due to HP inflation, but it's still there in 2e and earlier.

The wizard, by contrast, is a ranged skirmisher. In 3e he can move and cast a spell against a foe some distance away. If it works, that spell can very easily take out the monster in one hit. 2e and earlier casters don't have the mobility but they still have the firepower. If their plan works, they could very easily be in no danger of taking a hit at all. And because they have a range of spell levels, they can modulate this by pulling out the big guns for the scary encounters and sticking to the basics for the easy-looking ones. They also potentially have 'get out of jail free' cards like teleport or invisibility. Fighters have none of these options. They operate at the same basic level of ability in all fights, they have no way of escalating things due to perceived danger, and they have no easy way of escaping the shitstorm if things go bad.  

Ultimately, for a caster, HP loss is punishment for making a mistake. For a fighter, HP loss is simply a natural part of doing business.