# Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?



## Evenglare (Jun 24, 2014)

How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.


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## Agamon (Jun 24, 2014)

I'm on message boards, and I'm still not sure what your talking about.  3.x is broken?  Didn't know that.  Except maybe CoDzila, which I would not have had a name for without the internet, but I sure noticed in my 3.x games.


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## Majoru Oakheart (Jun 24, 2014)

I scrutinize it a lot.  When I play a character in a game, I look at all the numbers to give myself the best numbers.  I notice when one option is clearly better than another.

As a DM, I can't help but notice it.  When you go around the table and people yell out their damages and they are 8, 7, 8, 9, 37....you begin to wonder, why does one person have 37 while everyone else have less than 10.  Especially when monsters have 30 hitpoints.  You begin to wonder...why does it take 4 party members to take down one enemy and then another enemy goes down to one person.  It seems a little unfair.

It's likely you don't notice it because your players don't either.  I have players who don't know much about the numbers and don't care about them.  They are the ones doing 8 damage.  Then there are always one or two people who will spend a week making up a character in order to properly min-max them.  They are the ones doing 37 damage.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.




both 2e and 3e flaws where pointed out to me. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it. 4e I found them mostly on my own. I don't even agree with everyone online (I still don't think expertise was that bad in 4e, and really don't see power attack even with leap attack and a 2 handed weapon in 3.5)

In my experience you can totally even run into the flaw without seeing it.

Example: I watched and said nothing as a group with a half dragon fighter, a half celestial (half god fluff) paladin,  Drow half dragon wizard/cleric and half elf Monk.... I loved that they thought the Monk was Over powered and never realized that he was 5 or 6 levels above everyone else because of ECL... but even they saw a problem when the paladin died (glorious and honorable death) and the player brought in a human wizard/loremaster and boom came in "lower level" and still had so much more power.


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## DaveMage (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.




The min/maxers in my group do notice and have made powerful characters - all within the rules.  But, I run a published adventure (Slumbering Tsar), so if they have too easy at times, it's their own fault.  

Still, they all seem to be having fun, so I allow it.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 24, 2014)

I don't know if it's a question of noticing. After all, as people get more experienced with a system, they'll begin to understand whatever flaws it has, and either accept them or develop workarounds for them. A significant part of that process probably isn't even conscious, it's just the natural proficiency you develop by playing the game.



> Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards.



I wouldn't have either. I mean, if you think about it, it's clear that the saving throw bonuses are too good for the divine casters and not good enough for the straight martial types, or that there's no reason every element of spellcasting should be tied to the same ability score or that clerics should be able to cast their entire spell list, but these aren't things that have a tremendous impact on the typical play experience. By and large, it's a well-designed game, and particularly one that focuses on and achieves balance of this type to excess.

And then you read the outcries on the message boards. Still not a question of playing long enough to notice something, I think.


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## Hussar (Jun 24, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> both 2e and 3e flaws where pointed out to me. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it. 4e I found them mostly on my own. I don't even agree with everyone online (I still don't think expertise was that bad in 4e, and really don't see power attack even with leap attack and a 2 handed weapon in 3.5)
> 
> In my experience you can totally even run into the flaw without seeing it.
> 
> Example: I watched and said nothing as a group with a half dragon fighter, a half celestial (half god fluff) paladin,  Drow half dragon wizard/cleric and half elf Monk.... I loved that they thought the Monk was Over powered and never realized that he was 5 or 6 levels above everyone else because of ECL... but even they saw a problem when the paladin died (glorious and honorable death) and the player brought in a human wizard/loremaster and boom came in "lower level" and still had so much more power.




I think possibly that the biggest issue is levels played.  I've been in several groups where the highest level character is around 10th  level.  They just don't play higher than that.  Which, in 3e, hides most of the major issues.  Nobody bitches about a 4th level wizard, really.  Yes, you can break the game in single digit levels, but, by and large, you have to know what you're doing to do it.  For those who don't really care, it's not going to come up.

Where I really got an eye opener is when I started playing (well DMing) double digit level games.  Wow, that's where you see the issue, if it comes up, which isn't guaranteed.  I remember the group had a halfilng paladin for the longest time, and no problem at all.  Actually seriously underpowered to be honest (the player had multi classed to monk and then pious templar).  The character was virtually unkillable, but, couldn't hurt anything.  When the character did actually die (nothing is unkillable  ) the player brought back a straight human cleric.  The campaign by this time was 15th level or so.  

Now that was a shock.  The player went from being more or less invisible in combat with the paladin, to completely dominating every encounter.  So, to answer the OP, yes, I did see the problems I complain about in play.  But, I do agree that for a lot of groups and for a lot of time, the balance issues that people kvetch about are largely unseen in play.


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## The Myopic Sniper (Jun 24, 2014)

To be honest, I got a pretty big head start in noticing the brokenness of 3.0 as DM because I decided to convert a 15th level 2nd edition game and let players fiddle with their characters for the first dozen sections. The Druid, Wizard and Cleric pretty much just opted in to 15th level conversion with some obvious feat choices and just dominated from the get-go. The Fighter seemed instantly disadvantaged even though we went through about a dozen permutations of that characters feat-choices and I worked with the player to min-max the best I could before I started houseruling as many rules as I could to help the suboptimal classes and add new class features (I basically gave the martial classes spell-like powers before 4E. It worked well for those players, but we were really playing a different game from 3E at that point.)

Had we started a fresh campaign with those players, it would have taken a couple of years before we encountered any issues. I haven't had the issues with 6th - 10th level characters that some had in that system, but given my preferred campaign styles that isn't too surprising.


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## Jacob Marley (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.




I notice. I have been a strategy gamer for a very long time; it is actually hard for me not to notice. However, I also approach RPGs a little differently than I approach other games. With a game like 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons I will absolutely work to maximize every dollar earned while minimizing every dollar spent. After all, that's point of the game. With RPGs, my primary agenda is character/world discovery. I care more about what the character would do rather than min/maxing. 

Though there are some exceptions. For example, it has been over a decade since I played a 3.x character with a Constitution score below 14. 



Hussar said:


> I think possibly that the biggest issue is levels played.




Levels certainly play a role; not only in terms of 'level caps' but also how a character achieves high levels: organic versus built. A character who grows organically from level one to level x is quite often less efficient than one who is built at level x.

That said, I firmly believe that DM style is the single largest contributor to whether a player notices power discrepancies.


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## Evenglare (Jun 24, 2014)

I think for my group we roll 3d6 in order, cuts down on a lot of the min maxing BS. I suggest you guys try it if you have trouble with players. Actually for us it's 

Pick race (you are born)
Roll 3d6 in order 2 times, pick one and apply in order (functions as 2 different paths in life during childhood/adolescence)
Pick class (your profession as an adult)

I guess that's why I have never had problems. hmmm. I'm sure someone people wouldn't like it but that's how we have played for what... going on 15 years now. Right before 3rd came out.


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## Lanefan (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.



I don't scrutinize the individual numbers, but I do notice when they all add up to too much.

When I played 3e, for example, we had in the party a half-dragon fighter type who was something like +22 to hit and +24 damage at (8th? 10th? I forget, but somewhere 'round there) level...that's too much no matter how the numbers get there.

Lan-"the saving grace was that this same fighter had pathetic h.p. for its level and thus died off before it got completely ridiculous"-efan


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 24, 2014)

I notice the broken stuff, but generally don't care.  I'm looking to model PC concepts, not break the game open like a quail's egg.

I strongly suspect that the computer game designer and the math whiz in our group HAVE to see the broken bits, as do the guys who play a lot of M:tG and/or poker.  So that leaves out maybe...2-3 guys?

But it doesn't seem to impact the game in any obvious way, probably because of playstyle.  The one who could most easily break the game is the math whiz.  In the nearly 30 years I've played D&D with him, I know he favors Wizards above all other classes- at least 85% of his PCs are some kind of wizard.  And his characters' spell lists look pretty close to the ideal lists you see floating around on the Internet.  But the variations on his lists and his playstyle keep him from being "Angel Summoner" in a group of "BMX Bandits."


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## drjones (Jun 24, 2014)

Yeah I don't particularly care.  Every edition has had vast imbalances in player power in certain circumstances and it generally doesn't matter if the DM is doing a decent job and the players are not jerks.  If player A absolutely kills encounters with dragons then make sure some encounters have dragons but they don't all so others can shine.

Also my group has a few more experienced number crunchy players who help the others with leveling up choices if they want it, why would they not?  This is a co-op game with a living breathing referee not a MMO.  Adjustments can always be made on the fly to keep the game fun and interesting for everyone at the table.


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## Bluenose (Jun 24, 2014)

It took about an hour for my group to notice how different 3e was from 2e. Another hour or so to work out how and why it was so different. Of course, we had the advantage that we'd converted 10th level characters across (according to the conversion document), several of them were multiclassed Elves, and we were actually playing the game to see how it differed so repeated the adventure we'd run the previous week in 2e, so the changes were extremely obvious from the start. 

Then we went back and finished the campaign in 2e.


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## Majoru Oakheart (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> I guess that's why I have never had problems. hmmm. I'm sure someone people wouldn't like it but that's how we have played for what... going on 15 years now. Right before 3rd came out.



It helps.  But even rolling for stats doesn't fix the problems.  In fact, it can make it worse depending on what people roll.  Most of the problems come from combining choices during the game.

For instance, my character who was a Warmage/Dragon Slayer/Spellsword/Eldrich Knight who bought a +6 to all stats item from a splatbook.  His class features let him cast 9th level spells while wearing full plate with no arcane spell failure.  He had a feat that let him swap spell slots for bonuses to hit and damage.  So, he could swap a 9th level spell for +9 to hit and +9d4 damage for the round.  He got 4 attacks per round.  He could also cast a swift spell that let him resolve all attacks in one round as touch attacks.  Which allowed him to power attack for a huge amount and still hit with all 4 attacks.

What his starting stats were was rather insignificant to the build.

It's rather likely that you either didn't play at high level or your players didn't delve that deeply into the rules.  If your players are of the type who only took feats from the PHB, chose them for role playing reasons, single classed most of the time and chose spells somewhat randomly, you could easily make a 20th level character who was  balanced or even somewhat weak for their level.


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## Hand of Evil (Jun 24, 2014)

It is broken only at the DM's wish.  I have seen it a lot, where them DM just allows the player to play whatever they want without looking at how it is going to be impacting their games.  It is the DM's job to think about balance and what he is allowing the players to bring to the table.  

Just saying, if you are going to allow giant-slayers in your game, there better be giants in your game.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 24, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.




If you didn't notice 3.XE's broken-ness, then yeah, you're not going to notice this sort of stuff. 

I think it's a lot to do with individual mind-sets, and where your background is, and also whether enjoy genuinely analyzing things, or prefer to either ignore the details, or generalize about them.

If you're from any kind of gaming background where rules-mastery actually matters, and where rules change with some frequency, or are very very complex, then you probably have had to develop some degree of ability to analyze rules, to think of the consequences of rules, and to look at the maths behind the game.

That would include most TT wargames, but not really stuff like chess, where the actual rules are relatively simple.

I think with RPGs, another factor is how much you've been exposed to the consequences of badly-made rules - particularly where those consequences aren't just a "common sense" issue, but are a math issue, or something that is so fantastical that "common sense" approaches don't easily apply. If you've never had a game get messed up because a designer clearly didn't understand the consequences of a rules-design he made, you're much less likely to be keen on analyzing them.

Personally I'm pretty good at picking up "Potential Offenders", but I'll always have some "false positives" and miss some offenders too. As Mistwell has noted in other threads, a lot of stuff simply won't show up as fine or broken until the game is actually played. 

  [MENTION=371]Hand of Evil[/MENTION] - That's the problem we're discussing, you seem not to understand that. First off, is it the DM's job to think about balance when determining what PCs can pick race/class-wise? Not everyone would agree - some would suggest that if it's in, say "The Basic Set" or "The Official Book", it should already be balanced, and the DM shouldn't have to take precautions.

This was discussed at some length earlier in 5E's history, when some people felt that potentially-dangerous classes and races should be clearly labelled as such.

But that leads to another problem - many RPG authors are terrible at balance and do not know it. So they add something to a game, and don't understand how broken it is. If these professionals can't do it, why would we expect normal DMs to?

Some of us can, of course, but a lot of DMs just don't recognise balance problems, and few RPGs, certainly not earlier editions of D&D, train you to recognise them, because they usually operate on the basis that the RAW are pretty solid (which they often are not). I mean, here I am, highly experience with dozens or hundreds of rules-sets, understanding design principles, maths, and so on, extremely good at reasoning out the consequences of rules (by typical standards), and enjoying rules-analysis, and even I'm missing a lot of stuff, so to expect the average DM to be able to reliably pick out balance-issues before the game even starts? I don't think that's reasonable.

I won't even get into how DMs who feel the need to "balance" stuff aggressively but don't understand the rules very well often end up making things even less balanced.

EDIT - 5E proposes a VERY interesting solution to this, in the whole "Living Rules" concept, where they will apparently be monitoring the game regularly via surveys and the like to attempt to determine if stuff is seen as out-of-whack, but where they will, unlike 4E, be taking player sentiment into account, rather than just rules-designer analysis of whether something is functioning correctly (this is also unlike most on-going computer games, where typically player sentiment is largely discounted in favour of developers deciding "where they want the game to go" and so on).


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## Ratskinner (Jun 24, 2014)

I think I agree with you. Very few of the nightmares I read about have actually evidenced themselves in my games. Although I will say that a few of the "bigger" things did: way back in 2e the rules didn't actually support the whole epic story thing very well, in 3e it was the massive workload for the GM (me), and in 4e the game was like that "Everything is Awesome" song from the Lego movie and it was very hard to bend out of that feel. 

However, all those little things like feat taxes or CaGI and whatnot never really rose up. CoDzilla kinda touched my game, but everyone was multiclassing like mad so not as much as you might think. I think its also very group dependent. If no one is prowling gamer forums, the game tends to be better off.


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## Umbran (Jun 24, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I notice the broken stuff, but generally don't care.  I'm looking to model PC concepts, not break the game open like a quail's egg.




To quote Will Smith - "My attitude is:  Don't start nothin', won't BE nothin'."  If you look for something, of course you'll find it.  The question is whether you need to look for it.

Long ways back, I was playing in a White Wolf Mage game.  For those of you who are not familiar with old World of Darkness games, the cracks in the system that players can manipulate make most of D&D's issues look like pretty little butterflies.  And we had a local player who was very, very good at finding the exploits.  We are talking about a guy who now does this professionally, for the military - he designs and administrates wargame exercises for a living.

Our GM went to this player, and told him to make a group of Wyrm-tainted nasties, and he'd guest star as our enemies.  When the regular party (including me) heard this, we were kind of scared.  The guy was *good*.  He knew the rules up, down, and sideways, and we'd made little effort to min-max our characters.  We'd gone for concepts and a bit of coolness, not outright power.

To our surprise, and his, and the GM's, we mopped the floor with him.  It took some effort, we took a little damage, but he didn't come close to killing any of us.  The difference - we were four minds who had been playing together for years.  We knew each other's styles and competencies (the monster-player knew us, but didn't know our characters at all).  The term "well oiled machine" came to mind.  We used better tactics, avoided putting ourselves in a toe-to-toe slugfest (which we'd have lost horribly, I expect), and so on.  It was an awesome session.

Which is to say, I'd prefer a game in which you outthink the enemy in play, not in character build.  Far more satisfying, to me.


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## Desdichado (Jun 24, 2014)

We don't really play with the old skool "skilled play" mindset with my group.  Nor, do we usually play very high level.  A long campaign might get up into the very early double digits in terms of level.  Maybe.  Most don't go that long.

And the one confirmed min-maxer in our group needs it as a handicap.  His characters tend to die an order of magnitude more frequently than the rest of ours put together as it is.

As far as we're concerned, 3.x _isn't_ broken at all.  It's a poor game at higher level, though.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 24, 2014)

Umbran said:


> To quote Will Smith - "My attitude is:  Don't start nothin', won't BE nothin'."  If you look for something, of course you'll find it.  The question is whether you need to look for it.




I think there's another issue, though, where a lot of this stuff - you don't look for it, it's right there, it's just presented as a perfectly reasonable option to pick. Yet it might completely change the tone of the game if you do. SR and CP2020 both had stuff you could pick, which, superficially seemed fine (mostly spells in SR, guns/gun enhancements and some cyberware in CP2020), didn't look on-paper very bad, but in practice, holy crap, you couldn't even challenge a guy who had them without potentially either:

1) Making the rest of the PCs largely irrelevant (esp. in CP2020 - enough armour to slow down real offenders would usually make other PCs totally unable to do any harm at all).

2) Potentially killing all the other PCs.

You're not wrong in situations where all the PCs are equally optimized and a player would have to "go looking" to find unbalancing stuff, which is how a lot of RPGs are, of course, but there are a lot where silly stuff is just presented as fine.



Umbran said:


> Which is to say, I'd prefer a game in which you outthink the enemy in play, not in character build.  Far more satisfying, to me.




Definitely, though one can certainly do both. If a whole group is tightly optimized, you can ratchet up the challenge you present them (unless the premise of the game prevents it, in which case something went wrong earlier in the process).


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## Umbran (Jun 24, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Definitely, though one can certainly do both. If a whole group is tightly optimized...




Yep, if you have that uniform a bunch of people, that's great.  But that's a rather specific case that I, at least, have never worked with in practice.


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## Scrivener of Doom (Jun 24, 2014)

My only complaint about 3.xE was the time it took as DM to create things. The issues of imbalance between classes etc... never bothered me or my groups: I just DMed to make sure everyone got their spotlight time. But it just took too long to prepare for games.

However, 1E and 2E's flaws really got to me to the point where I am rationally irrational about my dislike of both editions. I still appreciate them but I despise them both. And that's why I can't get behind 5E despite clearly understanding why WotC went in the direction they did with the new edition.

4E? I love it to pieces just the way it is.


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## Der-Rage (Jun 24, 2014)

I tend not to notice things that are absolutely broken simply because I don't have enough opportunities to test out everything. I could feel out underpowered my Bard was in the most recent 3.X game I played, though that was exacerbated by a bad DM who built an encounter deliberately overpowered so that a DMPC could be introduced. (Bleh)

I do often completely misread rules and not notice how I've effed up until someone points it out. Like for the first year or so of playing 4E, I didn't realize that Charging was JUST a standard action, and not a move and a standard, and neither did our DM.


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## Stormonu (Jun 24, 2014)

I feel like I had a fairly good understanding of the shortcomings of 3E, but the only time I think I ran into issues when we converted our 1E/2E characters for a short-lived stint.  they were about 15th level and I just wasn't ready for the change in power at 3E.

Since then, I've avoided "high level" games, and start winding the game down start about 9th level and pretty much shutting down the campaign by 12th.  And really, with that self-induced limitation, I haven't run into any issues that I haven't been able to handle.  I know I've had players who have attempted to build powerful characters, but they usually end up being one-trick ponies who then get killed when they run into something where they've built a blindside into their character (and overconfident they could tackle anything). Basically, the long game killed them where they'd built to win the short-term gain.


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## DMZ2112 (Jun 24, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Yep, if you have that uniform a bunch of people, that's great.  But that's a rather specific case that I, at least, have never worked with in practice.




Agreed.  What I "notice" about the broken parts of the D&D3 continuum is how much individual players get screwed by the presence of other players at a different optimization threshold.


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## Desdichado (Jun 24, 2014)

Stormonu said:


> I feel like I had a fairly good understanding of the shortcomings of 3E, but the only time I think I ran into issues when we converted our 1E/2E characters for a short-lived stint.  they were about 15th level and I just wasn't ready for the change in power at 3E.
> 
> Since then, I've avoided "high level" games, and start winding the game down start about 9th level and pretty much shutting down the campaign by 12th.  And really, with that self-induced limitation, I haven't run into any issues that I haven't been able to handle.  I know I've had players who have attempted to build powerful characters, but they usually end up being one-trick ponies who then get killed when they run into something where they've built a blindside into their character (and overconfident they could tackle anything). Basically, the long game killed them where they'd built to win the short-term gain.



This is exactly what I've noticed as well--almost word for word.

Frankly, I think the trade-off is worth it, if a player is willing to accept the limitations of such an "optimized" build.  And frankly, I don't really miss the high level play all that much either.  I never did like it much or think that it worked well in _any_ edition of D&D, so that it didn't work very well in 3.x family games neither surprises me nor overly distresses me.  I just ignore those levels.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jun 24, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> both 2e and 3e flaws where pointed out to me. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.



Same here. I wasn't very critical of game balance until I became a regular forum-goer. I remember looking at the 3.0 sorcerer and thinking "Its spells are staggered a level behind the wizard, but once it reaches 18th level it can cast spontaneous _polar rays_...best class _evar_!!!" 

Some fans love new editions because it sets the RESET button on their over-familiarity and system analysis, but not so for me. I can't help analyzing even new rules, on some level; but I wouldn't want to 'unsee' D&D's ugly underbelly. I think it's made me a more thoughtful, tasteful person.


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## Hedonismbot (Jun 24, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I think there's another issue, though, where a lot of this stuff - you don't look for it, it's right there, it's just presented as a perfectly reasonable option to pick. Yet it might completely change the tone of the game if you do. SR and CP2020 both had stuff you could pick, which, superficially seemed fine (mostly spells in SR, guns/gun enhancements and some cyberware in CP2020), didn't look on-paper very bad, but in practice, holy crap, you couldn't even challenge a guy who had them without potentially either:
> 
> 1) Making the rest of the PCs largely irrelevant (esp. in CP2020 - enough armour to slow down real offenders would usually make other PCs totally unable to do any harm at all).
> 
> 2) Potentially killing all the other PCs.




This is, I think, why I can never get behind the 'just don't be an optimizer and everything will work out fine' issue. I've taken things that seemed fine and then ended up completely overshadowing other players, and also had other players fall into the same thing and overshadow me. I'd rather have a set of tools to flag stuff that might break the game ahead of time.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 24, 2014)

Hedonismbot said:


> I'd rather have a set of tools to flag stuff that might break the game ahead of time.



Anything might break the game.

Or to be more clear, anything with any meaningful benefit has a very real chance of breaking the game, if you define breaking the game narrowly.


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## n00bdragon (Jun 24, 2014)

The broken parts of 3e are not the myriad of +1s. Sure, you can optimize that way and make some nice characters, but in the end the truly broken stuff is the abilities that are "just so". They declare that things happen without the addition of dice or impose the rolling of basic skill checks on people and creatures that don't have points in them, basically stuff that avoids at all costs actually dealing with the mechanics of combat.


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## Blackbrrd (Jun 24, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Yep, if you have that uniform a bunch of people, that's great.  But that's a rather specific case that I, at least, have never worked with in practice.



I am running a 4e game with uniformly optimized characters. We agreed to make strong* characters that weighted offense before defense and pure damage before control. 

This has made combat fast, and easy to run for me as a DM. The only thing slowing it down is the darned 4e monsters that have too many fiddely bits. Even so, we managed 6 encounters in one session without problems. If it had been a dungeon crawl, we could easily have done 10. (About 6-7 hours effective play time).

In 3e I preferred DM-ing level 3-7 and the only time we got over level 11, the game ended in a TPK. I really dislike save-or-die spells, or the over-the-top control spells like Confusion. If you only play level 3-7, you usually avoid the super-optimized characters as well, since they often only starts to shine at level 10+.

*but no builds that rely heavily on magic items or weird-ass options from dungeon magazine.


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## Blackbrrd (Jun 24, 2014)

I noticed that 3.5 was broken when the seven strong party with two clerics and two wizards needed 30+ minutes to sort out the daily buff spells at level 12+. 

In combat you would usually have 2-3 additional "temporary" buff spells running as well. This meant you basically had to re-calculate your whole character all the time. My character self-buffed as well, so I probably had something like 7-8 buff spells running at a time. Not a problem for me, but of the other players, only one could have run the character without slowing down the game. The rest would just have spent ages trying to find what they had in to-hit.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 24, 2014)

Blackbrrd said:


> I noticed that 3.5 was broken when the seven strong party with two clerics and two wizards needed 30+ minutes to sort out the daily buff spells at level 12+.
> 
> In combat you would usually have 2-3 additional "temporary" buff spells running as well. This meant you basically had to re-calculate your whole character all the time. My character self-buffed as well, so I probably had something like 7-8 buff spells running at a time. Not a problem for me, but of the other players, only one could have run the character without slowing down the game. The rest would just have spent ages trying to find what they had in to-hit.




Well, that's simply unprofessional!

It doesn't matter what game- for some people, every option must be reconsidered at each decision point.  We have one or two guys like that in our group...and oddly, they rarely play primary casters.  Perhaps it is because they know they're slow with the "simpler" classes that they don't go that route.  IDK.

The guys who gravitate to the casters generally know what they want to do before it is time to act.


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## Lanefan (Jun 25, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Well, that's simply unprofessional!
> 
> It doesn't matter what game- for some people, every option must be reconsidered at each decision point.  We have one or two guys like that in our group...and oddly, they rarely play primary casters.  Perhaps it is because they know they're slow with the "simpler" classes that they don't go that route.  IDK.
> 
> The guys who gravitate to the casters generally know what they want to do before it is time to act.



Not in my experience. 

What I usually see is one of two things:

1. Every option gets reviewed every time - and this is in a game that doesn't have nearly as many as 3e - and analysed halfway to death, or
2. No options get looked at whatsoever; it's damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead, fireballs on full.


			
				Umbran said:
			
		

> Which is to say, I'd prefer a game in which you outthink the enemy in play, not in character build. Far more satisfying, to me.



Me too.  Character building and optimizing just aren't fun for me, when compared to actually playing the game.

Lanefan


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## Scrivener of Doom (Jun 25, 2014)

Blackbrrd said:


> I noticed that 3.5 was broken when the seven strong party with two clerics and two wizards needed 30+ minutes to sort out the daily buff spells at level 12+.
> 
> In combat you would usually have 2-3 additional "temporary" buff spells running as well. This meant you basically had to re-calculate your whole character all the time. My character self-buffed as well, so I probably had something like 7-8 buff spells running at a time. Not a problem for me, but of the other players, only one could have run the character without slowing down the game. The rest would just have spent ages trying to find what they had in to-hit.




One of my favourite groups of players had a similar problem but, being really numerate and computer-literate air traffic controllers, they simply built spreadsheets that allowed them to toggle the changes on and off. And, yes, that meant we ended up with a couple of extra laptops at the table but it wasn't a distraction: we were all there to play.


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## Blackbrrd (Jun 25, 2014)

Scrivener of Doom said:


> One of my favourite groups of players had a similar problem but, being really numerate and computer-literate air traffic controllers, they simply built spreadsheets that allowed them to toggle the changes on and off. And, yes, that meant we ended up with a couple of extra laptops at the table but it wasn't a distraction: we were all there to play.



Sounds familiar. I have played in a group with all engineers too. Not really a problem. Technical difficulties is there to be overcome. At the same time, this more or less illustrates the problems with 3e, and how 5e hopefully has managed to fix the problem so the game works well at a table with the rest of my friends, not just the engineers.


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## Ratskinner (Jun 25, 2014)

Blackbrrd said:


> In combat you would usually have 2-3 additional "temporary" buff spells running as well. This meant you basically had to re-calculate your whole character all the time. My character self-buffed as well, so I probably had something like 7-8 buff spells running at a time. Not a problem for me, but of the other players, only one could have run the character without slowing down the game. The rest would just have spent ages trying to find what they had in to-hit.




IMO, that's the fault of the design for 3e's buff spells (and 3e's general penchant for adjusting all you stats on the fly). If they had worked more like DW "hold" mechanic, I think it might have been easier. So you might have seen:

_Bull's Strength_: You or the target of this spell may hold 2d6. The recipient may spend a point of this hold to: give +3 to a strength or strength-based skill check, increase the strength modifier of melee attack by 2, or add 2d4 Str damage to a melee attack. An unspent hold vanishes after 10 minutes.

I dunno if that kind of design was kicking around back then, but I think it could have fixed a great deal of 3e's buff issues. (Consider applying it to Wildshape, for instance).

Edit: buff issues, not balance issues...although some of those might be helped as well.


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## Blackbrrd (Jun 25, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> IMO, that's the fault of the design for 3e's buff spells (and 3e's general penchant for adjusting all you stats on the fly). If they had worked more like DW "hold" mechanic, I think it might have been easier. So you might have seen:
> 
> _Bull's Strength_: You or the target of this spell may hold 2d6. The recipient may spend a point of this hold to: give +3 to a strength or strength-based skill check, increase the strength modifier of melee attack by 2, or add 2d4 Str damage to a melee attack. An unspent hold vanishes after 10 minutes.
> 
> I dunno if that kind of design was kicking around back then, but I think it could have fixed a great deal of 3e's balance issues. (Consider applying it to Wildshape, for instance).



That's quite similar to how they did it with 4e. It worked pretty well. I do like 5e's concentration for spells with duration though. I really hope you end up with encounters where it's really important to gank the buffing spellcaster to get rid of the concentration-buff-spells. It gives me the right vibes at least.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 25, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Me too. Character building and optimizing just aren't fun for me, when compared to actually playing the game.
> 
> Lanefan




They're almost never set against each other, though. You don't say "I'm not playing D&D this week, I'm building and optimizing my PC!". You build & optimize the PC_ before_ the game starts and/or _between_ sessions. 

People who enjoy both building and optimizing AND playing thus potentially have _more_ fun. Of course I'm also semi-blonde so _obviously_ I have more fun. 

Personally I enjoy optimizing PCs _up to a point_, and I actively dis-enjoy playing PCs who are obviously (to me) bad at their proposed job. The point I enjoy optimizing to is "Is this PC actively good at their job and potentially fun to actually play in ?", though, not the "Would the CharOp boards approve of this guy?".

Of course, in some games, optimization isn't really a thing, and in those cases I just build the PC purely to concept (but my concept will never be some sort of all-round incompetent!).


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## Zardnaar (Jun 25, 2014)

In AD&D with no hivemind we missed the dart specialist exploit. We did find the dagger one and multiple attack goodness and things like weapon grand mastery along with some of the better kits. We also found some spell combos.

 In 3.0 without the hivemind  I missed a lot of non core builds as I did not buy a lot of 3.0 class books. Also missed wands of CLW independently and how to really abuse the stacking rules via persistent spell and natural spell feat which was not core in 3.0. We did carry over a few 2nd ed combos, found out how good haste was and how to stack spells independently but not to the extent of the 3.0 cleric archer build. Also cheap scrolls using scribe scroll (+haste).

 Missed the Spelldancer abuse but spotted spell power via Shadow Adept and Red Wizard without using the net.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 25, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.




All of it?  I'm not aware of all of it now.

Enough of it?  It took me a single readthrough of the Summoner in Pathfinder to realise that if you turn the Eidolon into a scout you can out-sneak the rogue without much trouble, and if things go wrong it's not a catastrophe if the Eidolon dies.  It took me actually playing the Summoner to realise that even if you discount both the Eidolon _and_ Summon Monster you are almost as good a caster as a Sorcerer who has chosen a good spell list; Summon Monster pushes you over the top.  And it took brute force work to work out where the Summons could hold their own.

Likewise it took me a single readthrough of D&D 3.0 to work out that the ability to buy or craft a Wand of Cure Light Wounds quite literally changed the nature of hit points and the game itself.  And that the spellcasters with 9 levels of spells were the most powerful classes.  It took actually playing a few sessions online to realise that (a) multiclassing spellcasters was really bad and (b) the Monk had complete anti-synergy and was a whole lot weaker than it looked.

So.  How long does it take?  It varies.  And I'm not always right.


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## Storminator (Jun 25, 2014)

Actual quote from my last Pathfinder session (another player, talking to me): "I have +22 to hit. Why do you only have +21?"

Some people notice . . . 

PS


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## Ratskinner (Jun 25, 2014)

Storminator said:


> Actual quote from my last Pathfinder session (another player, talking to me): "I have +22 to hit. Why do you only have +21?"
> 
> Some people notice . . .
> 
> PS



I don't think that's a particularly edition-dependent thing though. I'm playing in an OSR group and one of our guys is constantly auditing other people's character sheets. (It doesn't help that we are constantly modifying the rules.)


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## keterys (Jun 25, 2014)

I notice this stuff pretty quickly, but I find it hard _not_ to notice math.

It was most obvious to me in 3e because variance was so much more extreme; you'd have people with 10-15 difference between attack or AC, or 5-10 for save DCs, and you could see the steady creep as it happened bit by bit (2 this level, 2 that level, etc), but it doesn't really matter which edition of D&D (or any other TTRPG).


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## Evenglare (Jun 25, 2014)

Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?


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## an_idol_mind (Jun 25, 2014)

I've played either 3rd edition or Pathfinder for almost 15 years now and still haven't noticed these supposedly broken parts. Either the handful of house rules I use dodges these issues or I run games differently than the way most folks on these forums run them. (Or there's a lot of theoretical "brokenness" that doesn't show itself during typical play.)


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## Campbell (Jun 25, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?




I think a lot of it has to do with emergent properties of play. When most of the play testing was done for 3e most players were still immersed in optimal behaviors for playing previous editions. If clerics mostly heal and buff other characters, wizards focus on artillery, and etc. most of the issues with 3e are not readily apparent. Scenario design also plays a big part. There's quite a lot that DMs can do under the surface to make play function more smoothly. Also in many cases systematic redesign is necessary to fix issues which have knock on effects that need to be accounted for. In general we're pretty good at coming up with good enough solutions if no one is pushing too hard at the game.

I don't consider 3e and Pathfinder bad games. I do think they are particularly fragile games, especially without some of the later 3e patches to Wildshape, Polymorph, etc.

It might also be interesting to look at a game like World of Warcraft. In raiding environments melee damage dealers have been sub-par for a long time as ranged character classes have improved in mobility. Guilds just changed their comps if they wanted to be more competitive, muscled through it regardless, etc. Now that there is a focused effort to decrease caster mobility there is much gnashing of teeth because it means updating rosters, having people switch to alts, etc. People have a wonderful capacity to adjust to the environment they find themselves in. I know when I actively played 3e one of my solutions was just to stop playing fighters and move towards more martially oriented clerics, psychic warriors, warblades, etc.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jun 25, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?




it was a mix...

Some just plain awful design (monte cook called it ivory tower design)
some just slip through the cracks (we redesigned saving throws from the ground up and didn't realize we nerphed half the classes)
some were things that just could not be forseen... I mean really how much playtesting does it take to revile all the brokenness
some were a biased look at the game... I'm sure they thought Bards rocked...

then after years of feed back, pathfinder could not make the sweeping changes it would need to and still be a 3.5 retroclone...witch is what they needed to sell it day one "See we will give you this edition back"


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 26, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?




3.0 Groupthink and lack of playtesting.

3.0 works up to about level 8 if you play it as if it was 2E.  What it took to break 3.0 was a _fresh pair of eyes_.  Someone who'd barely played 2E and started almost from scratch.  Unfortunately the designers were all big 2E players, and the playtesters were people who had connections, and therefore jumped to playing as if it was 2E.  And they fixed the problematic strategies.  Also 3E was only IIRC playtested up to about level 6.  One of the huge breakpoints is that in pre-3E, level 10 is endgame play.  The fighter gets a small army to make up for the wizard's spellcasting going off the charts.  In 3E they don't get that or any real replacement.  Because they didn't playtest it at those levels much.

Pathfinder?  Pathfinder's aiming its balance issues between the Pathfinder Wizard and the Pathfinder Rogue.  Or more accurately between the ground set out by the 3.X wizard and the 3.X monk.  And they even managed to upgrade wizards significantly due to relaxing further the requirements to create items (being fair they downgraded both druids and clerics who were the other two real problem cases in the 3.5 PHB).  That's a vast area to make things seemingly broken in.


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## diaglo (Jun 26, 2014)

i've noticed it since the introduction of Supplement I Greyhawk (1975)

bonus above +1 and other things added. the introduction of the power gaming creep.

i still blame Gary for letting his scions unleash it.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jun 26, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?





			
				Monte Cook said:
			
		

> When we designed 3rd Edition D&D, people around Wizards of the Coast joked about the "lessons" we could learn from Magic: The Gathering, like making the rulebooks -- or the rules themselves -- collectible. ("Darn, I got another Cleave, I'm still looking for the ultra-rare Great Cleave.")
> 
> But, in fact, we did take some cues from Magic. For example, Magic uses templating to great effect, and now D&D does too. (To be clear, in this instance, I don't mean templates like "half-dragon," so much as I mean the templating categories such as "fire spells" and "cold-using creatures," then setting up rules for how they interact, so that ever contradictory rules for those things don't arise again, as they did in previous editions.)
> 
> ...



.........................................................


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## diaglo (Jun 26, 2014)

i took the D&D course with James Wyatt and i bought a copy of D&D for Dummies for every member of my gaming group.

they didn't help.


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## Olaf the Stout (Jun 26, 2014)

When 4E was released I was still happily running a 3.5E game, so did not change editions.  By the end of last year, having run 3 campaigns from 1st level to mid-teens (and 1 campaign to 19th-20th level) I had well and truly started to notice all the broken bits in the 3.5E ruleset.

For me, high level play simply was not fun to run, and by the 3rd campaign, I started to find it not fun to run once the players were above around 10th level.

So for me, it was probably 5+ years of fortnightly play with the ruleset.  Some of the broken-ness was due to having additional splatbooks, but some of the broken bits would have been an issue if we were just playing with the core 3 rulebooks.


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## Wolfskin (Jun 26, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.



I didn't notice most of 3.X brokenness either, but then again I never ran a high level campaign from 3E to this day.

I _did _notice 3.X amply rewarded system mastery because I had a specific player who was always figuring out how to play the system to get the most out of it, and he did play a couple of mid-level optimized builds, though nothing game breaking (I didn't ascribe this exclusively to 3.X, though, as the guy did this for every single game he played, DnD or not)


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Wolfskin said:


> I didn't notice most of 3.X brokenness either, but then again I never ran a high level campaign from 3E to this day.



I've run several, including well into epic. What happens is not really all that different from what happened in 2e; magic becomes awe-inspiring and useless at the same time. All the powerful spells are there to be had, but there are so many reasons why they don't work that it ends up being not so great.

What sets 3e apart is the utilitarian role of magic items (and, to a lesser extent, mercenary spellcasting). Given large enough wealth, almost all character abilities become irrelevant. What emerges is that any notion of balance is very labile, depending not only on character level and on ability scores, but on money and related practical constraints.

The default conditions in the books (standard array and the wealth charts) are pretty favorable to spellcasters. But most people don't play anywhere near that territory. The lower you go on those parameters, the better spells look. The higher you go, the worse they look.


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## Hussar (Jun 26, 2014)

Why do you say that Ahn?  What evidence do you have that "most people don't play anywhere near that territory"?

Why the insistence on trying to project your experience onto a larger group of people?


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 26, 2014)

OK, everybody, we're going to need affidavits now from all your gaming friends and community members so we know exactly what percentage of gamers we're dealing with.


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## Hussar (Jun 26, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> OK, everybody, we're going to need affidavits now from all your gaming friends and community members so we know exactly what percentage of gamers we're dealing with.




Heh.  Ok, fair enough.  But, when people start claiming that "most gamers" play this way or that, I'm not really sure how useful that is.  I mean, Ahn here is claiming that most people ignored the wealth by level guidelines.  I'm kinda wondering where that comes from though.  Because if it's true, then one of the fundamental baselines for 3e was ignored by most groups, meaning that 3e is not based on what is actually being played at given tables.

I really don't think that's true.  But, to be fair, I have no evidence either way.  So, I don't think I'm being unfair by asking how Ahn arrives at the conclusion that most groups ignored WBL.  Some?  Oh sure. No problems there.  That's a pretty fair statement to make.  But most?  That's going to need a little more evidence.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Why do you say that Ahn?  What evidence do you have that "most people don't play anywhere near that territory"?



Have you ever read any of the dozens (and probably hundreds) of polls and threads here on topics here about what type of ability score generation or treasure allocation people are using? No? Anything in poll form usually bell curves around something above the "default". Read them and get back to me.

The way this plays out in in-game terms is very important. A character with the standard array is not a "hero" in the sense of being the protagonist of your favorite fantasy novel; that's why it's called "standard". The game, not surprisingly, does not play that way at that power level. That means anyone who wants to do plots of large-scale consequence in their world, or have characters that are on the level of mythic heroes needs to adjust things way upward. And most people indeed figured that out.

All of which has implications as far as relative usefulness of different character types.



> Because if it's true, then one of the fundamental baselines for 3e was ignored by most groups, meaning that 3e is not based on what is actually being played at given tables.



All of the fundamental baselines of 3e were almost certainly ignored by more groups than not. To suggest the contrary would be to impose of a group of millions of people of diverse experiences around the world a ludicrous standard of homogeneity. Are you suggesting that people out there are essentially playing exactly by the book, rules and guidelines, and not meaningfully deviating from any of it?

We discuss the published game here because it's a common frame of reference, but no one completely adheres to it (and even the original 3.0 core books presented all manner of paradigm-changing variants). And, I think it's fair to assume that by the time D&D had gotten into WotC's hands, people understood that. They understood that the OGL legitimized the widespread homebrewing community. They understood that variants needed to be built into the game. And the baseline was wrote not as an expectation to adhere to, but as an example to start from.

Feel free to start a thread asking how many people ever ran four-character groups at the same level with standard array or 4d6 ability scores and wealth matching the WBL tables through challenges with an EL appropriate to their level. And no houserules, variants, third party material, etc. etc.


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## Hussar (Jun 26, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> snip for the appeal to non-existent data
> 
> All of the fundamental baselines of 3e were almost certainly ignored by more groups than not. To suggest the contrary would be to impose of a group of millions of people of diverse experiences around the world a ludicrous standard of homogeneity. Are you suggesting that people out there are essentially playing exactly by the book, rules and guidelines, and not meaningfully deviating from any of it?




Nope.  Not at all.  I'm not saying anything because I honestly don't know.  You're the one making the claim.  You're the one who has to back it up with some evidence.  The company that is doing the best with D&D at the moment made its mark through modules which are all based on 3e mechanics and baselines.  Somebody was buying and playing those modules.  And, apparently people still are.  



> We discuss the published game here because it's a common frame of reference, but no one completely adheres to it (and even the original 3.0 core books presented all manner of paradigm-changing variants). And, I think it's fair to assume that by the time D&D had gotten into WotC's hands, people understood that. They understood that the OGL legitimized the widespread homebrewing community. They understood that variants needed to be built into the game. And the baseline was wrote not as an expectation to adhere to, but as an example to start from.
> 
> Feel free to start a thread asking how many people ever ran four-character groups at the same level with standard array or 4d6 ability scores and wealth matching the WBL tables through challenges with an EL appropriate to their level. And no houserules, variants, third party material, etc. etc.




But this is a straw man.  You don't have to adhere exactly to the rules to not get to where you are claiming that groups had significant variance from the baseline.  10-20% in either direction for party wealth would make little difference to the game, for example.  And, note, EL appropriate challenges is a mistaken interpretation of what 3e encounter guidelines actually say.  The 3e and 3.5 DMG are pretty clear that many encounters will not be EL par encounters.  

And why no house rules, variants or 3rd P materials?  Those are all based on the 3e baselines.  3rd Party materials are rightfully criticised when they vary too greatly from those baselines- that's why they get called broken.

But, yeah, this isn't likely to go anywhere.  I asked to see your evidence and got shown pretty much what I expected.  I see your anecdote and call with my own.  Get back to me when you have anything actually showing that your experiences are indicative of anything other than your own experiences.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Get back to me when you have anything actually showing that your experiences are indicative of anything other than your own experiences.



Just once, I should actually do that just to see what happens.


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## Lanefan (Jun 26, 2014)

[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] if you ran a quick poll (and it's probably already been done, I just don't have time to look for it) you probably would find that wealth-by-level wasn't adhered to very often in 3.x games.

Lanefan


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] if you ran a quick poll (and it's probably already been done, I just don't have time to look for it) you probably would find that wealth-by-level wasn't adhered to very often in 3.x games.



I would think another question would be what portion are even aware that they exist. Between experienced DMs who didn't bother to read the DMG, and new ones who learned through playing rather than reading, I've seen quite a few DMs who were unaware of significant parts of the DMG, often te "soft stuff" or guidelines. The rewards section is just one example.

And when you look into stat generation, it's quite the norm to see people doing something other than point buy, standard array, or straight-up rolls. Every time someone starts a thread on it, I see a new approach I hadn't even heard of before.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 26, 2014)

As has been said by others before, considering what is voluntarily self-reported on gaming forums as statistical evidence of gaming norms is...perilous.

Just talking from my own experiences in 3.X, the one place where there was routine variance from the core assumptions was in party size.  The only time we had a 4 man party was when people couldn't show up for game night.  In my circle, I was the only one who used 3rd party material, and several guys strictly limited the amount of non-Core WotC product as well.  Most stats were generated by point-buy, 4d6 or 3d6.  Parties consisted of PCs of all the same level.  Wealth by level only mattered when a new guy joined the group and needed to generate a PC of the appropriate level, or when campaigns stated at other than first...and then we used it as written.

House rules- other than excising certain WotC classes, spells, races, etc.- are the exception, not the rule for us.  Our new, active campaign has only one- an alteration in how flanking (and all the associated mechanics) works.

_Typical?  I have no idea._  But I don't assume one way or the other.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> But I don't assume one way or the other.



I do. I don't assume that everyone is deviating in any one particular fashion, but I do assume that given the number of opportunities to deviate from the defaults (for any number of reasons), anyone really adhering to all of them is a statistical improbability.

It would be like trying to find a driver who drives exactly the speed limit at all times.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 26, 2014)

There's a huge difference between variant rules being the norm and any _particular_ variant being the norm.


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## Ratskinner (Jun 26, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> There's a huge difference between variant rules being the norm and any _particular_ variant being the norm.



Definitely.

FWIW, IME 3e GMs regularly used the wealth by level table for NPCs. However I rarely saw anyone pay much attention to it for maintaining PC wealth or whatnot. 

Additionally, 3e was the first edition were I saw DMs wary of monkeying around with core game rules or assumptions. I believe that the visible complexity, volume, and density of both third and fourth editions was a contributing factor in this.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 26, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> FWIW, IME 3e GMs regularly used the wealth by level table for NPCs. However I rarely saw anyone pay much attention to it for maintaining PC wealth or whatnot.



I could see that; a lot of times NPC creation is simplified in various behind-the-curtain ways. Certainly not the way I've done it, but it makes sense on some level.



> Additionally, 3e was the first edition were I saw DMs wary of monkeying around with core game rules or assumptions. I believe that the visible complexity, volume, and density of both third and fourth editions was a contributing factor in this.



I didn't see this at all. What I saw was not complexity, but transparency. There was an absolute avalanche of d20 material published, and every player worth his salt would find some class published somewhere, or write his own. And then every DM would make up a new swath of rules for their campaign setting, and throw in some random variants. And then UA came out.

IME, 3e was what killed any notion of RAW play.


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## Hussar (Jun 27, 2014)

Whereas, for me, RAW play was far, far more common in 3e than in earlier editions.  Firstly, if you think that the number of variants and whatnot was somehow greater for 3e, you haven't looked at how much material got pumped out for 2e.  Secondly, you have 1e, where virtually no one played by RAW because no one could actually understand the rules as written because sometimes they really made no sense (1e initiative rules, I'm looking at you).

RAW play was pretty much standard AFAIC and IME in 3e.  Now, that's not saying that it was absolutely, 100% adhered to.  Of course not.  But, you could be pretty close most of the time.  I never saw a single player ever try to make his own character class, for example.  Not once.  Not in 3e.  Saw it loads of times in AD&D, but never in 3e.  And the number of "Core Only" DM's out there for 3e was hardly insignificant.  Sticking to Core was the standard response to any balance issues in 3e.  

Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently.  No problems with that.  My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do.  It's a fallacy.  You have no way of knowing how other people played, and trying to make your own personal play style seem like the norm is pretty much the standard line to take for any edition warring.  "Well, everyone plays this way, so, everyone else is just doing it wrong" is how it sounds, even if that's not the point you are trying to make.


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## Wolfskin (Jun 27, 2014)

EDIT: sorry, wrong thread


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## diaglo (Jun 27, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] if you ran a quick poll (and it's probably already been done, I just don't have time to look for it) you probably would find that wealth-by-level wasn't adhered to very often in 3.x games.
> 
> Lanefan




the way i mostly encountered wealth by level was in character creation. when the DM wanted us to created PCs at higher than lvl 1.
or when the DM used it for figuring out if an NPC had the wealth required to have what we wanted to buy and such.

but yeah, i agree with Lanefan mostly.


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## diaglo (Jun 27, 2014)

Wolfskin said:


> Well, the Human Commoner entry in the playtest's Bestiary has nothing but 10s in its ability scores, so I'd say 5e assumes PCs are extraordinary specimens.
> 
> I don't quite understand what use is the Human Commoner in the Bestiary, though.




since the birth of D&D in 1973 and print in 1974 humans and everything else you encounter is a monster. only the PCs are not.


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## Hussar (Jun 27, 2014)

Again, taking wealth by level, I'd say this is a concept that has been adhered to for a long, long time.  

If my 3rd level party (any edition) has 150000 gp worth of equipment, what would be your reaction as a DM?  I'd say most DM's would be looking at that pretty askance and words like "Monty Haul" would be floating up.  Why?  Because we've given out far more treasure than is expected for that level.  D&D is chock a block with advice on how to avoid this pitfall in campaign design.

Conversely, a 10th level group with 1000 gp worth of equipment between them is a pretty far outlier as well.  It would not be expected.  Heck, even AD&D had tables for generating higher level PC's which included magic items.  And followers that were higher than first level (such as a cleric or fighter might gain) had greater wealth than lower level ones.

Sure, it might not be exactly on the nose, but, I'm willing to bet that there was closer adherence to wealth by level than not.  Certainly within tolerances for the game.  I know my players, in any edition, got a bit antsy if they thought the loot wasn't forthcoming enough.  I doubt I'm the only DM in the world who has had players grumble about not having enough cool toys.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jun 27, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> IME, 3e was what killed any notion of RAW play.



My own personal history of messing with the game rules matches your perception, but the sense I get from others is that I'm very atypical. In my naivety as a young 2e gamer, I assumed that there was a good reason for each and every rule, despite how hair-brained 2e is in retrospect. It seems that every time a pre-WotC edition comes up, those who played it agree that you almost _have_ to house rule it due to contradictions and vagaries.

I went through a sort of rules-awareness awakening during my 3.x years, and ended up with a truly massive set of house rules. And you're probably right that groups who follow _all_ of the RAW are rare, but I never met a DM who did 1% of the rules tinkering that I did, and even most forum-goers seemed to be happy enough with the RAW to _mostly_ stick to it.

I certainly agree that 4e is much more transparent than any previous edition, though that doesn't stop a lot of DMs from thinking that it's difficult to house rule.  I myself only had 2-3 house rules before I began DMing C4, and that's more than any 4e DM I know.

So anyhow, I wouldn't take my own data points as evidence of any larger trend. Even if everyone could agree that X% of gamers follow Y% of the rules, pretty much everyone could use the numbers to defend their own position.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 27, 2014)

I've definitely seen the 3rd level party with more than 150,000 gp in equipment. Not as the typical party, for sure, but it's there. Heck, we had one game with a 2nd level character starting off with an artifact for no real reason. (I mean a real artifact-level weapon with commensurate power that wasn't deus ex machina-ed away after a session or anything).

It depends on what you'd consider the tolerance to be. The only use I've ever had for the WBL charts is to triple them and round off for starting characters, which is on the low end of what I've seen other DMs do. And then some people run low magic games. It varies considerably.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 27, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently.  No problems with that.  My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do.  It's a fallacy.  You have no way of knowing how other people played...




Exactly.


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## sheadunne (Jun 27, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Whereas, for me, RAW play was far, far more common in 3e than in earlier editions.  Firstly, if you think that the number of variants and whatnot was somehow greater for 3e, you haven't looked at how much material got pumped out for 2e.  Secondly, you have 1e, where virtually no one played by RAW because no one could actually understand the rules as written because sometimes they really made no sense (1e initiative rules, I'm looking at you).
> 
> RAW play was pretty much standard AFAIC and IME in 3e.  Now, that's not saying that it was absolutely, 100% adhered to.  Of course not.  But, you could be pretty close most of the time.  I never saw a single player ever try to make his own character class, for example.  Not once.  Not in 3e.  Saw it loads of times in AD&D, but never in 3e.  And the number of "Core Only" DM's out there for 3e was hardly insignificant.  Sticking to Core was the standard response to any balance issues in 3e.
> 
> Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently.  No problems with that.  My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do.  It's a fallacy.  You have no way of knowing how other people played, and trying to make your own personal play style seem like the norm is pretty much the standard line to take for any edition warring.  "Well, everyone plays this way, so, everyone else is just doing it wrong" is how it sounds, even if that's not the point you are trying to make.




In all my groups in 3x/pathfinder we have always played pretty strictly by RAW. House rules were rare except for points of clarification when the rules were ambiguous. Same with WBL. I usually track my characters WBL and if we're below expectation I make sure to let the DM know (most of the time it's because s/he didn't adjust for the number of players) and if it's over I usually find a non optimized way of filtering it out, such as donating it to a church, overpaying for things, etc. I don't particular like 3x/PF when it deviates too far from the RAW expectations.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 27, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently.  No problems with that.  My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do.



I'm not claiming that, and have never even hinted at that. As a matter of principle, if I thought I was playing "typical" D&D, I'd stop and do something else. So I assume exactly the opposite of what you're trying to say.

I'm not claiming that I know what people do, only that I know one particular thing they _don't_ do, namely hew precisely to guidelines in the books. The variety of other possibilities for what they're doing is well outside of the purview of my knowledge.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 27, 2014)

Tequila Sunrise said:


> My own personal history of messing with the game rules matches your perception, but the sense I get from others is that I'm very atypical. In my naivety as a young 2e gamer, I assumed that there was a good reason for each and every rule, despite how hair-brained 2e is in retrospect. It seems that every time a pre-WotC edition comes up, those who played it agree that you almost _have_ to house rule it due to contradictions and vagaries.



Probably age is a significant issue here. 2e was long-lived. There are a lot of people who started on it, and thus played it perhaps somewhat naively. ENW's demographic being what it is, there aren't that many such people here.



> I went through a sort of rules-awareness awakening during my 3.x years, and ended up with a truly massive set of house rules. And you're probably right that groups who follow _all_ of the RAW are rare, but I never met a DM who did 1% of the rules tinkering that I did, and even most forum-goers seemed to be happy enough with the RAW to _mostly_ stick to it.



The irony for me is that I've never met a DM who was anywhere near as obsessed with RAW play as I am, and I've been walking over the books from day 1. I think our experience is probably atypical in that, as ENWorlders, we're relatively obsessive about this hobby; we know the rules, and we study them. If anything, I'd guess most people are much farther out in the weeds than the average poster here.


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## Olaf the Stout (Jun 27, 2014)

diaglo said:


> since the birth of D&D in 1973 and print in 1974 humans and everything else you encounter is a monster. only the PCs are not.




This here kids is the rare sighting of the dangerous beast known as diaglo! 

I haven't seen you around here in ages! 

Personally I agree with the comments about not sticking to the PC wealth by level.  I don't think I've done it in my games, simply because it isn't much fun for players or GM's to try and keep track of the GP value of the stuff they own.


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## Obryn (Jun 27, 2014)

I've gotten better over the years to the point where I think I'm usually pretty accurate about weighing gameplay bits and pieces. Far from perfect, but better than I was a few years ago. 

Completely outside D&D, I playtested Feng Shui 2 recently. The bits I thought looked broken (Sifu, Bag of Guns, Gene Freak), often were. However, other bits interacted weirdly and I didn't notice them until they came up in play. 

I try to err on the side of calling things fine, these days, and save my worries for factors like action denial.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 27, 2014)

Olaf the Stout said:


> Personally I agree with the comments about not sticking to the PC wealth by level.  I don't think I've done it in my games, simply because it isn't much fun for players or GM's to try and keep track of the GP value of the stuff they own.



Personally, when I'm making NPCs, I just give them the magic items I feel like they should have. I don't want to do math. The value is often an interesting surprise.

I suspect a lot of deviation from default assumptions is not a product of some concerted effort to rewrite the game, but simply doing what comes naturally and easily.


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## Jacob Marley (Jun 27, 2014)

sheadunne said:


> In all my groups in 3x/pathfinder we have always played pretty strictly by RAW. House rules were rare except for points of clarification when the rules were ambiguous. Same with WBL. I usually track my characters WBL and if we're below expectation I make sure to let the DM know (*most of the time it's because s/he didn't adjust for the number of players*) and if it's over I usually find a non optimized way of filtering it out, such as donating it to a church, overpaying for things, etc. I don't particular like 3x/PF when it deviates too far from the RAW expectations.




Enlighten me as to how this is possible. In 3.5 the Dungeon Master's Guide Tables 3.2: Encounter Difficulty, 3.3: Treasure Values per Encounter, and 5-1: Character Wealth by Level are related in such a way that, if they are strictly followed, they should not produce a character below expected wealth by level, regardless of the number of players that show up.


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## Hussar (Jun 27, 2014)

True but even the best of us make mistakes. And it's not like you have to be dead on the nail. There is a reasonable range. After all wbl grows as you level so there will be times you are high and low depending on where you are in a level.


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## sheadunne (Jun 27, 2014)

Jacob Marley said:


> Enlighten me as to how this is possible. In 3.5 the Dungeon Master's Guide Tables 3.2: Encounter Difficulty, 3.3: Treasure Values per Encounter, and 5-1: Character Wealth by Level are related in such a way that, if they are strictly followed, they should not produce a character below expected wealth by level, regardless of the number of players that show up.




When you run modules or APs, it is usually based on 4 players not 2 or 6. If you do not adjust the module/AP you gain more or less treasure. Or if you end up bypassing a section it can lead to less treasure than expected. In my experience most alterations involved increase the number of creatures or the difficulty of the creature based on the number of players, but they do not alter the amount of treasure gained. It's easy to forget that you need to do both.


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## Lanefan (Jun 28, 2014)

sheadunne said:


> When you run modules or APs, it is usually based on 4 players not 2 or 6. If you do not adjust the module/AP you gain more or less treasure. Or if you end up bypassing a section it can lead to less treasure than expected. In my experience most alterations involved increase the number of creatures or the difficulty of the creature based on the number of players, but they do not alter the amount of treasure gained. It's easy to forget that you need to do both.



Where wealth-by-level always falls apart is when characters start dying off; because their wealth often ends up spread around among the remaining party members.

So, if you have a party of 5 all happily trucking along at expected wealth level X and one dies, the remaining four are suddenly at 125% of X.  And they're not likely to part with it when the dead character gets replaced (probably at wealth level X again).  So now you've got 4 at X=1.25 and one at X=1.  Then the new guy dies.  Now the first four are at X=1.50 while the fifth player* hauls out the dice again.  And what was this wealth-by-level thing anyway?

* - all too often me.

Lanefan


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## DaveyJones (Jun 28, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Where wealth-by-level always falls apart is when characters start dying off; because their wealth often ends up spread around among the remaining party members.



this is where in OD&D(1974) they had rules in place. but mostly b/c they didn't want someone losing out next time they played too far behind. you inherited stuff from your former PC part of it going to pay costs to bury. but only if you wanted to keep running Zapnard the XVII. the previous XVI died while adventuring.


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## sheadunne (Jun 28, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Where wealth-by-level always falls apart is when characters start dying off; because their wealth often ends up spread around among the remaining party members.
> 
> So, if you have a party of 5 all happily trucking along at expected wealth level X and one dies, the remaining four are suddenly at 125% of X.  And they're not likely to part with it when the dead character gets replaced (probably at wealth level X again).  So now you've got 4 at X=1.25 and one at X=1.  Then the new guy dies.  Now the first four are at X=1.50 while the fifth player* hauls out the dice again.  And what was this wealth-by-level thing anyway?
> 
> ...




Good point. It's also gets wonky when at one moment you're sitting on 2,000 gp of scrolls and wands and the next time to calculate WBL they're used up so your numbers are off. And then there's party items, bought, found, or crafted that are used to benefit the party as a whole, such as wands of cure or instant fortresses or ships for travel.


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## Zardnaar (Jun 28, 2014)

Evenglare said:


> Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?





 Was not play tested that well and apparently not at all over level 10. They also play tested it like 2nd ed and missed things like wands of CLW, polymorph and 3.0 haste. They also missed the combinations around stacking magic items and spells. They more or less ported over spells from 2nd ed untouched and did not account for the relaxation of the AD&D restrictions, the different levelling rates AD&D had and the change to saving throws. They basically nerfed the fighter for example.

 Also a lot of groups were not part of the internet hivemind so they were not power gamers as such or evne knew about how good wands of CLW are,


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## Campbell (Jun 28, 2014)

One of the more interesting things about the role playing hobby to me is that most tabletop RPGs are designed and developed by creative professionals with strong language skills that lack somewhat in mathematical rigor, but played by a significant number of professionals with strong analytic backgrounds. There are a few factors that I feel encourage this:


RPG designers are also responsible for communicating and writing the material based on their designs.
If you have a penchant for process analysis and a head for math the wage gap for choosing to pursue a career in game design is quite a bit higher than it is for most creative professionals. This is changing as design and communication skills become more valued in the work place.
The standard for mechanical rigor in tabletop RPGs is especially low. Most games in the hobby do not stand up to strong analysis. See: Flat character creation costs vs. exponential character improvement costs in many popular games. 
There is a cultural bias against holding designers to account for lack of rigor. GMs are often told to manipulate events to bring games back in line. See: advice in many popular games that chasetise power gamers and optimizers.
Many gamers do not like rules transparency.
Low budgets across the industry make comprehensive testing difficult. Also, even games which are tested do so in an environment that involves GMs futzing with rules. Testing is also all too often seen as something that happens after games are developed and designed mostly in full rather than seen as something that is integral across the lifespan of a project.
Lack of disciplined project management leads to games being released well before they are ready. This is almost accepted as a norm.'
Too much armchair analysis and theorycrafting rather than drilling down and seeing how systems and processes really interact with each other.

This isn't really a 3e thing. It's a tabletop RPG thing. It also used to be quite common in the early days of MMOs. Blizzard smartened up and started hiring some of the math whizzes that analyzed their game, but they can afford that. Most RPG publishing companies, even WotC cannot.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 28, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> Was not play tested that well and apparently not at all over level 10.



It might have not been playtested well enough, but I think it's clear that 3e, and subsequently PF, are the products of better research and testing than any other other rpg ever made, by a ludicrous margin. Maybe the bar isn't that high, but give them some credit.

They took a ton of feedback from the existing 2e crowd and really nailed it. If you go back twenty years, it would be hard to imagine a version of D&D as universally functional as 3e. That it has its problems was inevitable, and it's unfortunate that they haven't been addressed.



> They also play tested it like 2nd ed and missed things like wands of CLW, polymorph and 3.0 haste.



Well, they did fix Haste in the revision, and they started patching polymorph in various ways towards the end. A little slow on their part, perhaps.



> They also missed the combinations around stacking magic items and spells. They more or less ported over spells from 2nd ed untouched and did not account for the relaxation of the AD&D restrictions, the different levelling rates AD&D had and the change to saving throws. They basically nerfed the fighter for example.



The fighter did get screwed in the new save system a bit, that's for sure. And the infinite diversity in infinite combinations of the spell system is inherently problematic. So yes, these are real things. But compared to the limitations of the AD&D chassis or the huge fundamental problems with 4e or the incoherence we've seen with the 5e playtests, these seem like nitpicks.

And that's kind of the thread topic. It seems that because 3e is so well-known (in part because of the OGL and in part because of its sheer popularity) it gets held to a higher standard. I wish people would take the level of scrutiny they apply to 3e, and apply it equally to other games.



> Also a lot of groups were not part of the internet hivemind so they were not power gamers as such or evne knew about how good wands of CLW are,



While it may be true that most groups aren't active on the internet, I think wands of CLW are probably pretty well known.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 28, 2014)

Campbell said:


> One of the more interesting things about the role playing hobby to me is that most tabletop RPGs are designed and developed by creative professionals with strong language skills that lack somewhat in mathematical rigor, but played by a significant number of professionals with strong analytic backgrounds.



To a great degree I think I actually concur with this.



> [*]The standard for mechanical rigor in tabletop RPGs is especially low. Most games in the hobby do not stand up to strong analysis. See: Flat character creation costs vs. exponential character improvement costs in many popular games.



I think that's simple traditionalism. The original ideas that started the hobby simply can't be left behind, apparently.



> [*]There is a cultural bias against holding designers to account for lack of rigor. GMs are often told to manipulate events to bring games back in line. See: advice in many popular games that chasetise power gamers and optimizers.



Perhaps a more apt philosophy would be to criticize metagaming? Clearly some player behaviors are inappropriate and abusive, and go beyond the reasonable imperative to optimize. And clearly, DMs are responsible for modifying the game to do what they want it to do, though that doesn't exclude its flaws.

That being said, I do think it's true that there's a cultural perception that the people who write these games, if you like them at all, are immune to criticism.



> [*]Many gamers do not like rules transparency.



Very possibly with good reason on some level. DMs certainly need it, but for a player, the less you know about what's going on outside of the scope of the character's knowledge, the more of an in-character roleplaying experience you're having.



> [*]Low budgets across the industry make comprehensive testing difficult. Also, even games which are tested do so in an environment that involves GMs futzing with rules. Testing is also all too often seen as something that happens after games are developed and designed mostly in full rather than seen as something that is integral across the lifespan of a project.



Rules should be tested with DMs messing around with the rules. To not do so would be like testing a car and only driving it in a straight line at 25 mph. The rules need to be put through their paces. There's nothing wrong with relying on post-market surveillance either.

Realistically, you're also describing how the pharmaceutical industry works, and there's a lot more money in that than there is in rpgs, so I don't know how much we can reasonably expect from the latter.



> [*]Lack of disciplined project management leads to games being released well before they are ready. This is almost accepted as a norm.'



That does seem to be an issue.



> [*]Too much armchair analysis and theorycrafting rather than drilling down and seeing how systems and processes really interact with each other.



We really don't have any effective means of accumulating specific empirical data in a rigorous and unbiased manner. It seems like D&D should be the one trying to do that, but...



> This isn't really a 3e thing. It's a tabletop RPG thing. It also used to be quite common in the early days of MMOs. Blizzard smartened up and started hiring some of the math whizzes that analyzed their game, but they can afford that. Most RPG publishing companies, even WotC cannot.



I guess we'll be waiting a while longer then, won't we?


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## Hussar (Jun 28, 2014)

> the huge fundamental problems with 4e




What would those be?  I mean, I'm sorry, I can understand not liking 4e for a lot of reasons, but, mechanical failure isn't one of them.  To give you an idea, I'm running a short adventure for a group of six PC's.  The only limitation I've given is 15th level.  That's it.  And, I know that I can trust the system enough that they won't run roughshod over the adventure nor will it devolve into rocket tag.

I agree that 3e was a lot more durable than earlier editions, but, 4e is at least as durable as 3e if not moreso.  And, to be honest, the "incoherence" in 5e is based far more on an insistence of play style that no edition of D&D has ever really supported except in the minds of a small segment of fandom that insists that D&D is somehow a sim based game.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jun 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> What would those be?  I mean, I'm sorry, I can understand not liking 4e for a lot of reasons, but, mechanical failure isn't one of them.  To give you an idea, I'm running a short adventure for a group of six PC's.  The only limitation I've given is 15th level.  That's it.  And, I know that I can trust the system enough that they won't run roughshod over the adventure nor will it devolve into rocket tag.
> 
> I agree that 3e was a lot more durable than earlier editions, but, 4e is at least as durable as 3e if not moreso.  And, to be honest, the "incoherence" in 5e is based far more on an insistence of play style that no edition of D&D has ever really supported except in the minds of a small segment of fandom that insists that D&D is somehow a sim based game.



Well said! This matches my experiences as well. Would give you xp, but can't!


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> What would those be?



The standard modifier is completely broken. A feeble character of sufficient level can break down a door. The same problem that existed specifically with BAB/THAC0 and saves in earlier editions now applies to everything. Remember that article about how 3e actually simulates basic things like applications of strength and everyday skills up through level 6 or so? 4e totally fails that test. You've got at-will magic for everyone, you've got self-healing for nonmagical characters, you've got minions whose basic numbers don't withstand any scrutiny at all, beginning characters with triple hit points. Any one of those could be considered world-breaking.

Again, how they compare to _each other_ is a downstream consideration. If you can't make one balanced character on an island, you can't balance two characters against each other. In 3e (and earlier editions) there are some (if not many) balanced characters and creatures, and some unbalanced ones, things that maybe should be corrected in some way depending on context. In 4e, there are no balanced characters/creatures to begin with; zero.

The more dynamic and less inflationary mechanical structures of 3e (and to be fair, the earlier editions and the relatively flat math we've seen from 5e) are much more inherently balanced.



> And, I know that I can trust the system enough that they won't run roughshod over the adventure nor will it devolve into rocket tag.



What you refer to as rocket tag isn't a "mechanical failure" or lack of balance though. It's a statement about the pacing and swinginess of combat. Rocket tag can be perfectly balanced, and can be a perfectly well-executed norm for combat.

The merits of that particular mode are debatable, of course. I'm not a huge fan myself; that's why I like those battles of attrition that wound systems can produce.



> And, to be honest, the "incoherence" in 5e is based far more on an insistence of play style that no edition of D&D has ever really supported except in the minds of a small segment of fandom that insists that D&D is somehow a sim based game.



I think far more people are concerned with internal consistency and logic than with mapping the game to specific real-world phenomena.


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## Hussar (Jun 28, 2014)

Sorry, Ahn, but, no.  Rocket Tag, meaning that one side or the other wins depending on who wins initiative, is the antithesis of balanced game play.  That's why it's a problem.  It makes the game more or less meaningless because winning or losing is basically a flip of the coin - no tactics, no strategy, no "smart play".  All because the math is so far out of whack that whoever rolls higher on the d20 initiative roll wins the combat.

As far as your criticisms of 4e, it would really, really help to actually have read the rules, particularly ALL the rules, before making broad sweeping comments like that.  Because even a facile reading of the rules proves your criticisms baseless.  "A feeble character of sufficient level can break down a door"?  Yup, if my 20th level character is facing doors that a 1st level character would have faced, then sure, no problem.  However, since no one outside of some very, very bizarre theory crafted scenarios actually has this happen at the table, it's not really an issue.

And, I just had it explained to me that so long as elements are consistent, then the world will simply adjust around them.  That was the whole argument about Hit Points that was brought up in this or another thread like it.  

Look, I get that you don't like 4e.  That's perfectly fine.  What I've never understood is why people feel the need to justify their dislike.  Dislike it away.  No one is making you play it.  Go right ahead.  But, please stop conflating your personal tastes for objective quality.  It makes discussion pointless.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Sorry, Ahn, but, no.  Rocket Tag, meaning that one side or the other wins depending on who wins initiative, is the antithesis of balanced game play.  That's why it's a problem.  It makes the game more or less meaningless because winning or losing is basically a flip of the coin - no tactics, no strategy, no "smart play".  All because the math is so far out of whack that whoever rolls higher on the d20 initiative roll wins the combat.



A coin fip is the definition of perfectly balanced. In context, as you note it's a coin flip weighted by the relevant capacities of its participants. It may not be the most engaging tactical gameplay, but it's balanced alright.

The balance in the system itself is discrete from any consideration of how engaging or enjoyable it is. Chutes and Ladders is perfectly balanced. Not much of a game for adults though.



> Yup, if my 20th level character is facing doors that a 1st level character would have faced, then sure, no problem. However, since no one outside of some very, very bizarre theory crafted scenarios actually has this happen at the table, it's not really an issue.



If your definition of "balance" is "the level of difficulty is matched to the capacity of the character", than everything's balanced isn't it? After all, in what bizarre scenario would someone encounter a door? Sorry, but "the DMG told me to avoid all the situations where the rules fall apart" isn't much of an excuse for how broken they are, unless there's some actual reasoning behind it. And I read enough to know that there isn't.



> And, I just had it explained to me that so long as elements are consistent, then the world will simply adjust around them.







> Look, I get that you don't like [3]e.  That's perfectly fine.  What I've never understood is why people feel the need to justify their dislike.  Dislike it away.  No one is making you play it.  Go right ahead.  But, please stop conflating your personal tastes for objective quality.  It makes discussion pointless.



Maybe you should stop talking about how "balanced" 3e is or is not then; see above quote.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 28, 2014)

As I understand it the real-world sport of Kendo, and games such as Legend of the Five Rings, are all about the "winning initiative is everything" concept of battle.  I can't imagine that can't be balanced in their own contexts.  It depends on what you want, as always.  Getting into a fight where you know that your chance of survival is dependent on that one roll - that's emotionally tense.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 28, 2014)

I imagine that 4e minions must spend a lot of time at bars drinking and commiserating with each other about how the PCs are playing "rocket tag" with them. Hopefully they never get in bar fights.



			
				Savage Wombat said:
			
		

> It depends on what you want, as always. Getting into a fight where you know that your chance of survival is dependent on that one roll - that's emotionally tense.



It also places a very different set of considerations on the steps one takes to prepare for, initiate, or avoid battles. It could be argued that all low-level D&D is "rocket tag", as one decent hit can drop any character to negatives. That tension and sense of danger is a very large part of the D&D experience. I often think that players play much smarter at lower levels because of it.


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## Pickles JG (Jun 28, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> I imagine that 4e minions must spend a lot of time at bars drinking and commiserating with each other about how the PCs are playing "rocket tag" with them. Hopefully they never get in bar fights.
> 
> It also places a very different set of considerations on the steps one takes to prepare for, initiate, or avoid battles. It could be argued that all low-level D&D is "rocket tag", as one decent hit can drop any character to negatives. That tension and sense of danger is a very large part of the D&D experience. I often think that players play much smarter at lower levels because of it.




I am not sure 4e minions think of themselves as such -they are the heroes of their own stories, sadly their stories are not the ones we are telling. 

We came across minions in Feng Shui but I used to argue against adding minions to 3e.  I thought they were already there - low level monsters that were killed incidentally (eg ogres when we were fighting a pack of giants). The difference is that those ogres posed no credible threat to PCs while minions do - in fact they are scary if you cannot take them down quickly. 5e should sort this out to everyone's satisfaction as mooks remain threatening but will go down fast.

Low level D&D was not tense in my 3e experience (I cannot really remember 1e - frustrating is my vague recollection). 
In 3e at low levels monster damage could fairly easily knock you unconscious but was very unlikely to take you to -10. High level is where it got tense & dangerous when a monster could deal 40 points of damage in a round so you were close to death if you had 30 HP. Neither is very satisfactory - -8 hp at level 1 or 2 is too far gone to heal efficiently so you were out for the day or the next one too. Bleating & running when you have a big chunk of HP also seem lame. 
4e evened this out but probably made it a bit too safe as characters hardly ever die & the real risk is a TPK when too many PCs go down quickly. I shall lok forward to seeing how 5e does it. 



Ahnehnois said:


> ...beginning characters with triple hit point




Triple what? This reflects your blinkered view. Nothing has HP for PCs to triple - I don't think 4e has to be consistent with 1e for it to be internally consistent. Minions are obvious issue here but it's a separate one. 

D&D is a terrible simulation. 4e took what D&D was best for - killing things & taking their stuff & made robust consistent rules for doing that.


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## Zardnaar (Jun 28, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> It might have not been playtested well enough, but I think it's clear that 3e, and subsequently PF, are the products of better research and testing than any other other rpg ever made, by a ludicrous margin. Maybe the bar isn't that high, but give them some credit.
> 
> They took a ton of feedback from the existing 2e crowd and really nailed it. If you go back twenty years, it would be hard to imagine a version of D&D as universally functional as 3e. That it has its problems was inevitable, and it's unfortunate that they haven't been addressed.
> 
> ...





 In early 3.0 we did not use wands of CLW and I do not think they were even in the DMG as I have lost mine. I played with a Pathfinder group as late as a few weeks ago who were not using wands of CLW. I am playing OSR games now and some of the new clopnes more or less use d210 mechanics but with classses based on 1st ed or whatever and it turns out that play style is still fun just without the byzantine mechanics at times.


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## Lanefan (Jun 28, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> In early 3.0 we did not use wands of CLW and I do not think they were even in the DMG as I have lost mine.



They were, after a fashion: craft magic item + wand can reproduce a spell effect = wand of CLW.


			
				Pickles JG said:
			
		

> I am not sure 4e minions think of themselves as such -they are the heroes of their own stories, sadly their stories are not the ones we are telling.



And right here is where it falls apart.  If they are the heroes of their own stories that makes them heroes; whose stories could just as easily be the ones being told by the play-of-game.  That you've instead chosen to tell the story associated with the PCs means nothing; those other guys are still just as much heroes as the PCs in the eyes of the greater game world - and should logically have the stats (and h.p.) to reflect it.


			
				Pickles JG said:
			
		

> Low level D&D was not tense in my 3e experience (I cannot really remember 1e - frustrating is my vague recollection).
> In 3e at low levels monster damage could fairly easily knock you unconscious but was very unlikely to take you to -10. High level is where it got tense & dangerous when a monster could deal 40 points of damage in a round so you were close to death if you had 30 HP. Neither is very satisfactory - -8 hp at level 1 or 2 is too far gone to heal efficiently so you were out for the day or the next one too. Bleating & running when you have a big chunk of HP also seem lame.



Low-level 1e is - or should be - very dangerous.  The heroes are those who simply manage to survive.  At higher levels it gets more survivable given reasonable play.

I found 3e to be about equally deadly all the way along, less so than 1e at low level but more so once things got going.  


			
				Pickles JG said:
			
		

> 4e evened this out but probably made it a bit too safe as characters hardly ever die & the real risk is a TPK when too many PCs go down quickly.



That's certainly how it looks, that the whole party largely rise and fall together.


			
				Pickes JG said:
			
		

> I shall lok forward to seeing how 5e does it.



Don't.

Instead, look forward to how you're going to tell 5e to do it, as in theory the modules will be there to make it play more like 3e or 4e (not sure about their 1e emulator yet) depending on preference and how you decide to kitbash it.

Lanefan


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## Pickles JG (Jun 29, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> And right here is where it falls apart.  If they are the heroes of their own stories that makes them heroes; whose stories could just as easily be the ones being told by the play-of-game.  That you've instead chosen to tell the story associated with the PCs means nothing; those other guys are still just as much heroes as the PCs in the eyes of the greater game world - and should logically have the stats (and h.p.) to reflect it.



I was being metaphorical, I just meant from the point of view of the minions the world revolves around them. There is very little chance of their stories being told as they are not the PCs. They probably don't care after all they don't really have a point of view as they do not exist. The greater game world does not have any eyes; anything is only significant to the extent it effects the players, including the DM



Lanefan said:


> Instead, look forward to how you're going to tell 5e to do it, as in theory the modules will be there to make it play more like 3e or 4e (not sure about their 1e emulator yet) depending on preference and how you decide to kitbash it.
> Lanefan




It seems to me like it's really 2e with far better designed systems. 
4e does what I want already & my home groups being resistant to forking out for yet another edition. Some of them I am sure would prefer it though others would like it to be more like 3e which I would not. I am not sure how these modules will make it more like what we would all want given that is very different.

As a 4e fan it seems a million miles away from what I want (specifically a deeply tactical game) while it looks a lot like 1e in flavour. I suspect your preferences colour it the other way

The rest of my play is likely to be in OP settings where we will be stuck with the default.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

You know, the problem with wands of CLW had nothing to do with their being wands.  All it did was save you 25% of the cost of buying fifty healing potions, which had existed in previous editions.  The problem was the ease with which PCs could make their own healing items.  If 2e characters had been able to find fifty healing potions every adventure and carry them around, they would have.


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> And right here is where it falls apart.  If they are the heroes of their own stories that makes them heroes; whose stories could just as easily be the ones being told by the play-of-game.  That you've instead chosen to tell the story associated with the PCs means nothing; those other guys are still just as much heroes as the PCs in the eyes of the greater game world - and should logically have the stats (and h.p.) to reflect it.



Eh? The point is that they aren't the heroes.

You could run a game full of goblin and kobold PCs, where you have most human minions running around.


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## Lanefan (Jun 29, 2014)

Pickles JG said:


> I was being metaphorical, I just meant from the point of view of the minions the world revolves around them. There is very little chance of their stories being told as they are not the PCs. They probably don't care after all they don't really have a point of view as they do not exist. The greater game world does not have any eyes; anything is only significant to the extent it effects the players, including the DM



And as in theory everything in the game world affects the DM, it's all significant. 

And the non-PC types certainly *do* exist in the game world.  Game-world inhabitants without a player attached don't go around with little "NPC' stickers on their foreheads; they're an integral part of the setting just like the PCs are.  I don't subscribe to the PCs-as-special-snowflakes school of thought. 



> As a 4e fan it seems a million miles away from what I want (specifically a deeply tactical game) while it looks a lot like 1e in flavour. I suspect your preferences colour it the other way.



Hey, I don't mind me some deep tactics now and then; I just don't want that to be the whole game, or close.  1e with the ability for deep tactics when desired?  Sounds great! 

Lanefan


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## Lanefan (Jun 29, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Eh? The point is that they aren't the heroes.
> 
> You could run a game full of goblin and kobold PCs, where you have most human minions running around.



They aren't the *played* heroes.  But, as was pointed out earlier, in their own minds they're still heroes - and who knows, one of them could be your next character when the current one dies...and I can't speak for you but I sure as hell don't want my character to be permanently stuck at a total of 1 h.p.   On the other hand, if the new PC comes in at 57 h.p. then it had 57 h.p. before the player took it over...

If internal consistency is at all important then every creature has some h.p. vaguely commensurate to a few factors including size, toughness, and life experience.  The average Human peasant might have 3 or 4 h.p. total; not many, but enough to survive a punch in the head from another commoner.  The average run-of-the-mill Hill Giant might have 40 h.p.; not many in Giant terms but enough to survive a punch in the head from another Giant and surely enough to survive a few chops from a Human's wimpy little sword.

Lan-"the world works as the world will, whether PCs are there or not"-efan


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## FireLance (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> The standard modifier is completely broken. A feeble character of sufficient level can break down a door. The same problem that existed specifically with BAB/THAC0 and saves in earlier editions now applies to everything. Remember that article about how 3e actually simulates basic things like applications of strength and everyday skills up through level 6 or so? 4e totally fails that test. You've got at-will magic for everyone, you've got self-healing for nonmagical characters, you've got minions whose basic numbers don't withstand any scrutiny at all, beginning characters with triple hit points. Any one of those could be considered world-breaking.



 So, it fails in just about every aspect of a simulation, and it is more of a fantasy role playing _*game*_ than a rules-as-physics simulation of a world?


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> They aren't the *played* heroes.  But, as was pointed out earlier, in their own minds they're still heroes - and who knows, one of them could be your next character when the current one dies...and I can't speak for you but I sure as hell don't want my character to be permanently stuck at a total of 1 h.p.   On the other hand, if the new PC comes in at 57 h.p. then it had 57 h.p. before the player took it over...
> 
> If internal consistency is at all important then every creature has some h.p. vaguely commensurate to a few factors including size, toughness, and life experience.  The average Human peasant might have 3 or 4 h.p. total; not many, but enough to survive a punch in the head from another commoner.  The average run-of-the-mill Hill Giant might have 40 h.p.; not many in Giant terms but enough to survive a punch in the head from another Giant and surely enough to survive a few chops from a Human's wimpy little sword.
> 
> Lan-"the world works as the world will, whether PCs are there or not"-efan



If you have a kobold PC, he's going to have however many hit points a PC of his class, level, and stats would normally have. If it's being treated as a minion, a kobold has 1. I don't see what the problem is? I mean, those minion kobolds are just imaginary and who cares what _you_ imagine _they_ might imagine? They're not the PCs, because no players are playing them.

Things "off screen" have no hit points, since hit points are a gameplay convenience and stuff "off screen" is, by definition, not being played at the time and thus needs no gameplay convenience.

And the PCs deserve to be treated differently because (1) real people are playing them at a game table, presumably to have a good time, and (2) they are in 99% of all play time, so they're clearly more important than anything else. Who would hand someone a 8th level character with 1 hit point? That sounds like a terrible thing to do to your friends!


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> It might have not been playtested well enough, but I think it's clear that 3e, and subsequently PF, are the products of better research and testing than any other other rpg ever made, by a ludicrous margin. Maybe the bar isn't that high, but give them some credit.




Um... this is sarcasm?

And far and away the best playtested RPG ever has been Brown Box D&D.  Gygax wasn't a particularly good designer (as anyone who's ever read Cyborg Commando or Dangerous Journeys: Mythus would know) - but he was playing oD&D almost as much as was humanly possibly with a group of hardcore wargamers who were playing to win.  There has been no development process like it in the history of RPGs.



> They took a ton of feedback from the existing 2e crowd and really nailed it. If you go back twenty years, it would be hard to imagine a version of D&D as universally functional as 3e. That it has its problems was inevitable, and it's unfortunate that they haven't been addressed.




Sure they nailed it - nails in the coffin of any semblance of balance.  They quite literally tore out almost all the restrictions on the spellcasters, shattered the saving throw mechanics, stripped the fighters power away (have you ever seen what a 2E fighter can do?), took away the fighter's army that was given to them to make up for the wizard's escalating magic, and then without thinking of the effects turned the game from a 10 level game with really high level spells being plot devices into a 20 level game where the wizards could cast plot devices and the fighter had _less_ power beyond the reach of his sword than in previous editions - and dropped from the best saving throws in the game to one of the worst.

Calling 3.X universally functional isn't true.  People enjoy it for what it is - but it _certainly_ isn't universally functional.



> Well, they did fix Haste in the revision, and they started patching polymorph in various ways towards the end. A little slow on their part, perhaps.




On the revision they also broke druids.  



> The fighter did get screwed in the new save system a bit, that's for sure. And the infinite diversity in infinite combinations of the spell system is inherently problematic. So yes, these are real things. But compared to the limitations of the AD&D chassis or the huge fundamental problems with 4e or the incoherence we've seen with the 5e playtests, these seem like nitpicks.




The problem isn't "infinite diversity in infinite combinations of the spell system".  It's that the saving throw system is simply non-functional, making Save or Suck spells the _easiest_ to get through the defences - and to end combats.  The problem is therefore that the entire offensive magic system is broken out of the box.  And the utility magic system makes spells pointless.



> And that's kind of the thread topic. It seems that because 3e is so well-known (in part because of the OGL and in part because of its sheer popularity) it gets held to a higher standard. I wish people would take the level of scrutiny they apply to 3e, and apply it equally to other games.




I for one think I do.  And there are games worse out there than 3.X.  A lot of them.



Ahnehnois said:


> I think that's simple traditionalism. The original ideas that started the hobby simply can't be left behind, apparently.




oD&D was the most bullet proofed RPG in history.  The language was ... Gygaxian and it was geared to a certain mode of play.  But if we're talking about the original ideas, oD&D is very solid.



> Very possibly with good reason on some level. DMs certainly need it, but for a player, the less you know about what's going on outside of the scope of the character's knowledge, the more of an in-character roleplaying experience you're having.




Also as a player the scope of your character's knowledge that isn't directly being communicated to you is _vast_.  



> Rules should be tested with DMs messing around with the rules. To not do so would be like testing a car and only driving it in a straight line at 25 mph. The rules need to be put through their paces. There's nothing wrong with relying on post-market surveillance either.




Rules should first be tested being run straight with as little DM interference as possible.  To not do this would be like selling a car that doesn't work without the driver first opening the hood and rewiring it.



Ahnehnois said:


> The standard modifier is completely broken. A feeble character of sufficient level can break down a door.




So.  An archwizard who's spat in Lolth's eye places their hand against a wrought iron door that a strong farmboy couldn't open, utters a mystic word, and it shatters.  A feeble but very skilled monk who's stolen teeth out of the mouth of a Purple Wyrm looks at the door, narrows their eyes, and taps it to set up resonance before the door shatters easily.  And you consider these examples a bad thing?



> The same problem that existed specifically with BAB/THAC0 and saves in earlier editions now applies to everything.




The problem that people got better at fighting as they got higher level?



> Remember that article about how 3e actually simulates basic things like applications of strength and everyday skills up through level 6 or so? 4e totally fails that test. You've got at-will magic for everyone,




This is a straight up fabrication.  You have at will magic for all mages - but not for fighters or thieves.  I fail to see how the presence or absence of at will magic simulates basic things in _either_ direction.



> you've got self-healing for nonmagical characters,




No you haven't.  You've got people who actually behave as they do in the real world rather than having hit points as an on/off switch.  If you are down healing surges you aren't fully healed.  If you want to see healing surges being spent go watch a boxing match.



> you've got minions whose basic numbers don't withstand any scrutiny at all,




You've got minions who are _utterly outclassed_.  Whose combat numbers are barely worth worrying about when facing professionals.  So they get simplified.



> beginning characters with triple hit points.




And now you are contradicting yourself.  If you are making the claim that everyone has self healing then you can not at the same time be making the claim that starting characters have hit points in three digits.  They only have hit points in three digits _if you count the hit points from healing surges._  If you do that then you have no self-healing at all for most PCs.  Make up your mind which it is.  



> Any one of those could be considered world-breaking.




Given that most of them are false, this is irrelevant.  If you come up with a list of false statements then you can invent whatever forms of world breaking you like.



> Again, how they compare to _each other_ is a downstream consideration. If you can't make one balanced character on an island, you can't balance two characters against each other. In 3e (and earlier editions) there are some (if not many) balanced characters and creatures, and some unbalanced ones, things that maybe should be corrected in some way depending on context. In 4e, there are no balanced characters/creatures to begin with; zero.




Utter nonsense.  There is no such thing as a balanced character on an island.  Balance is all about how they compare to each other.  But I'm not sure where you get the idea that there are no balanced creatures in 4e.



> The more dynamic and less inflationary mechanical structures of 3e (and to be fair, the earlier editions and the relatively flat math we've seen from 5e) are much more inherently balanced.




"Less inflationary"?  In 3e power level doubles every two levels.  In 4e power level doubles every four levels.  In 3E a second level PC can easily have twice the hit points of a first level character.  In 4E they are likely to have 25% more hit points than a first level character.  In 3E a level 20 brute monster can have +57 to hit with their primary attack bonus but an AC of only 35.  3.X is the most inflationary version of D&D that there has ever been.



Ahnehnois said:


> A coin fip is the definition of perfectly balanced. In context, as you note it's a coin flip weighted by the relevant capacities of its participants. It may not be the most engaging tactical gameplay, but it's balanced alright.
> 
> The balance in the system itself is discrete from any consideration of how engaging or enjoyable it is. Chutes and Ladders is perfectly balanced. Not much of a game for adults though.
> 
> If your definition of "balance" is "the level of difficulty is matched to the capacity of the character", than everything's balanced isn't it?




And if your definition of balance is "the game accurately tells you the level of difficulty" then your argument goes away.  And the 3.X challenge system is shown to be not fit for purpose.



Ahnehnois said:


> I imagine that 4e minions must spend a lot of time at bars drinking and commiserating with each other about how the PCs are playing "rocket tag" with them. Hopefully they never get in bar fights.




Or perhaps bar fights don't involve edged weapons with people trying to kill each other.  4e minions spend time hoping that professional armed to the teeth killers don't slaughter them because they normally know how badly outclassed they are.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> They aren't the *played* heroes.  But, as was pointed out earlier, in their own minds they're still heroes - and who knows, one of them could be your next character when the current one dies...and I can't speak for you but I sure as hell don't want my character to be permanently stuck at a total of 1 h.p.   On the other hand, if the new PC comes in at 57 h.p. then it had 57 h.p. before the player took it over...
> 
> If internal consistency is at all important then every creature has some h.p. vaguely commensurate to a few factors including size, toughness, and life experience.  The average Human peasant might have 3 or 4 h.p. total; not many, but enough to survive a punch in the head from another commoner.  The average run-of-the-mill Hill Giant might have 40 h.p.; not many in Giant terms but enough to survive a punch in the head from another Giant and surely enough to survive a few chops from a Human's wimpy little sword.
> 
> Lan-"the world works as the world will, whether PCs are there or not"-efan




All characters have an approximate strength and toughness and behave as they do in the world.  But the camera is almost invariably following the PCs.  The map is displayed at _whatever scale the PCs are at the time_  This doesn't mean that the underlying reality has changed, any more than switching from a Mercator to a Peters Projection or a Waterman Butterfly changes the world.  The game mechanics aren't the laws of the world - they are a map reflecting what is going on in the world.

Neon-"But we don't actually roll it out when the PCs aren't there"-Chameleon


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## Hussar (Jun 29, 2014)

This really is the fundamental issue isn't it?  That one group of players wants the mechanics to be able to be applied regardless of the presence of players or not.  The DM might not roll the encounter, and very much most likely won't.  The orcs ambush the caravan and kill the guards and burn the caravan.  We don't bother actually rolling through that without the players present.  But, it has to be possible.

I admit, I certainly don't subscribe to this point of view, but, that's what it is isn't it?

To me, the mechanics are only required when there are player's present.  Any other time, it's pure free form and whatever I want to happen, happens.  For example, in my next adventure, a bunch of demonic constructs have bubbled out of the crypt beneath an abbey and killed everyone.  That's what has happened.  I'm certainly not going to try to actually roll it out.  Heck, I don't even know how many priests were in the abbey at the time.  It's not important.

My very serious question though is, if this is what you want, why on earth do you play D&D?  D&D has never, ever actually presented this as a way of play.  Play has always assumed that anything off screen is done free form.  Until Eberron, not a single D&D game world was written based on the mechanics of the day.

If you think it was, what AD&D, or OD&D mechanics account for the Rain of Colorless Fire?


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

I don't believe you're right there - Planescape took the cosmology seriously (something Eberron didn't).  Secondly there were rules for things like wandering monsters - that were based on the mechanics at least as much as freeform.  And in the earliest editions the DM was also known as the referee for very good reasons.  But even there they didn't play out NPC vs NPC battles, and when someone asked what the monsters in his dungeon ate in the Lake Geneva group Mike Mornard promptly threw in a McDungeons on the sixth level, with prices in copper pieces.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

FireLance said:


> So, it fails in just about every aspect of a simulation, and it is more of a fantasy role playing _*game*_ than a rules-as-physics simulation of a world?



The terms "fantasy roleplaying game" and "world simulator with rules as physics" are synonyms.

That being said, that's not what I was saying. Whether a minion corresponds to anything in reality or not is not the point. The point is that it isn't balanced with something that is not a minion (and probably not with most of its fellow minions either). If classed characters aren't balanced with minions, solos, and all the rest, what does it matter how they compare to each other. Comparing a fighter to an orc or giant is a lot more pertinent than comparing him to a wizard.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Things "off screen" have no hit points, since hit points are a gameplay convenience and stuff "off screen" is, by definition, not being played at the time and thus needs no gameplay convenience.



Are we to conclude that every NPC's hit points cease to exist every time he leaves the PCs' line of sight and then rematerialize the next time the PCs meet him? With exactly the same amount of damage? (Or not, depending on the circumstance).

Come on, now. Surely, regardless of their gaming philosophy, ENWorlders understand object permanence.



			
				Hussar said:
			
		

> That one group of players wants the mechanics to *be able* to be applied regardless of the presence of players or not.
> ...
> To me, the mechanics are only required when there are player's present. Any other time, it's pure free form and whatever I want to happen, happens.



Highlighted this for a reason. To be "sound" or whatever you want to call them, the mechanics need to work for any situation that the ruleset could reasonably be expected to cover. That doesn't mean that any individual group will execute all possible applications of the rules, or should. When they are or are not necessary is the DM's call. Routinely, they aren't necessary on screen, let alone off. And certainly, most everything offscreen happens without rules; it's not like DMs around the world are sitting in front of a computer with dice playing out the history of their campaign world.

But if the mechanics really work, they shouldn't just work in one rather narrow set of circumstances.


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> Are we to conclude that every NPC's hit points cease to exist every time he leaves the PCs' line of sight and then rematerialize the next time the PCs meet him? With exactly the same amount of damage? (Or not, depending on the circumstance).
> 
> Come on, now. Surely, regardless of their gaming philosophy, ENWorlders understand object permanence.



Your error is in thinking of "hit points" as objects. Come on now.

NPCs have hit points when gameplay requires them to have hit points.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Your error is in thinking of "hit points" as objects.



They are objects. Fictional objects to be sure, but in the relevant sense they are objects.



> NPCs have hit points when gameplay requires them to have hit points.



Exactly my point. Gameplay requires that they have them all the time, or else you end up with some serious nonsense.


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> They are objects. Fictional objects to be sure, but in the relevant sense they are objects.
> 
> Exactly my point. Gameplay requires that they have them all the time, or else you end up with some serious nonsense.



No, you clearly don't, because >99.999% of all narratives in the world don't ever consider the idea of hit points.

They lack the standing of fictional objects. A kobold is a fictional object. A hit point is a game mechanic. You can talk about Holden Caulfield without mentioning hit points, even if you imported him to Greyhawk.


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## Der-Rage (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> The terms "fantasy roleplaying game" and "world simulator with rules as physics" are synonyms.



Uh, no they're not. They're categories that sometimes overlap, but there are plenty of fantasy roleplaying games that are not world simulators with rules as physics, and some world simulators with rules as physics that aren't fantasy RPGs, or RPGs at all. More to the point, no edition of D&D has ever been the latter.



> That being said, that's not what I was saying. Whether a minion corresponds to anything in reality or not is not the point. The point is that it isn't balanced with something that is not a minion (and probably not with most of its fellow minions either). If classed characters aren't balanced with minions, solos, and all the rest, what does it matter how they compare to each other. Comparing a fighter to an orc or giant is a lot more pertinent than comparing him to a wizard.



But one does not compare a fighter to a single orc or giant in a vaccuum. The context matters, and in the context of a given fight, what matters how the fighter and his allies compares to the opponent and the opponent's allies. Minions simulate opponents that are drastically outclassed by the PCs by themselves but *in a group* with other enemies may pose a threat. 

No individual Persian could stand up to the Spartans, but together they overwhelm them.


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## Bluenose (Jun 29, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> And right here is where it falls apart. If they are the heroes of their own stories that makes them heroes; whose stories could just as easily be the ones being told by the play-of-game. That you've instead chosen to tell the story associated with the PCs means nothing; those other guys are still just as much heroes as the PCs in the eyes of the greater game world - and should logically have the stats (and h.p.) to reflect it.




The thing is, I don't think it does fall apart. When the view of hit points is that their inflation is caused by the increasing skill/magic/luck of the target - it is for all humanoids - then 4e minions make some sense, in that they're supposed to be employed only when their "base form" is thoroughly outclassed by the PCs. The tricks they've learnt to avoid dying aren't good enough any more, and their hit points drop accordingly. Very simply, competing in your own class gives even results, competing against much weaker or much stronger opponents and you'll look like a god/chump accordingly. So, Minions (and Solos and Elites).


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> The terms "fantasy roleplaying game" and "world simulator with rules as physics" are synonyms.




No they aren't.  Not even close.  There are a _few_ RPGs that try to run under rules-as-physics, GURPS being an obvious example, and it being a not unpopular approach in the 80s.  Try and play D&D this way and you get The Order of the Stick which, while funny, isn't how I imagine any sort of game world to work.  As for an RPG being a world simulator, nope.  No RPG I am aware of with the arguable exception of Kingdom tries this (arguable that it's an RPG).  And when you try to force D&D to be a world simulator you get weird results.  Results where a Lawyer (Profession (Lawyer)) makes the same amount of money as a Shoe Shine Boy (Profession (Shoe Shine Boy)) - something that's _barely_ acceptable for PCs who get their money from adventuring and the profession skill is just there for a flash of colour, but is risible if you try to run the entire world using these rules.  (Or pick any two other professions you care to name that have an obvious status disparity).  And for the average person from day to day your income from your profession is much _much_ more important than your BAB.



> Comparing a fighter to an orc or giant is a lot more pertinent than comparing him to a wizard.




Actually, no.  Comparing a PC to a PC and an NPC to an NPC is much more pertinent - what they do in play is a whole lot more similar.  Comparing a fighter to an orc or giant is only needed _for the one scene you find them together in_ - and for that scene the 4E rules work well.



Ahnehnois said:


> Are we to conclude that every NPC's hit points cease to exist every time he leaves the PCs' line of sight and then rematerialize the next time the PCs meet him? With exactly the same amount of damage? (Or not, depending on the circumstance).
> 
> Come on, now. Surely, regardless of their gaming philosophy, ENWorlders understand object permanence.




Your analogy is flawed.  Hit points are not objects.  Hit points are a map, not the territory.  The rules are not a physics sim.  Surely you understand the difference between google maps in its map mode, its satellite mode, and in Google Street View?  And that all three of these are different from the actual place in question?


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## Hussar (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> snip
> 
> What you refer to as rocket tag isn't a "mechanical failure" or lack of balance though. It's a statement about the pacing and swinginess of combat. Rocket tag can be perfectly balanced, and can be a perfectly well-executed norm for combat.
> 
> ...






> A coin fip is the definition of perfectly balanced. In context, as you note it's a coin flip weighted by the relevant capacities of its participants. It may not be the most engaging tactical gameplay, but it's balanced alright.
> 
> The balance in the system itself is discrete from any consideration of how engaging or enjoyable it is. Chutes and Ladders is perfectly balanced. Not much of a game for adults though.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...notice-all-of-this-stuff/page10#ixzz3622zUBvQ




Swimming upthread and putting these together.  

This is a case where I think Ahn is both right and wrong at the same time.  Yes, rocket tag - as in whoever wins initiative wins the fight - is balanced.  But, it's only balanced within that single encounter.  We don't play D&D that way though.  We are going to have dozens of encounters over a campaign and that's why rocket tag is unbalanced.  It would be like playing Chutes and Ladders where one player has ten pieces on the board while everyone else just has one and whoever gets to the end wins.

D&D combat is not ever balanced on a 50:50 chance of PC fatality.  There's a reason that most encounters should be EL par and only eat up 20-25% of party resources.  If you go higher than that, the lethality of the campaign increases to the point where it becomes pointless - endless PC death is not a good campaign and the game certainly isn't based on that idea.

Balance should never, ever be discrete from how enjoyable a game is.  The whole point of balance is to increase the enjoyment of the game.  Again, this is why Chutes and Ladders is considered a terrible game.  It's entirely random and no amount of skill will help you.  That's why balance is so important and when balance breaks down, the game becomes unenjoyable.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> D&D combat is not ever balanced on a 50:50 chance of PC fatality.



Well, no. The chance of PC fatality is dependent on the difficulty level and the actions of the players. The rocket tag moniker again simply indicates combat that is fast and swingy, but that can still be slanted in the players' favor.



> endless PC death is not a good campaign and the game certainly isn't based on that idea.



Endless PC death sounds pretty archetypically D&D to me. It also matches up pretty well with the biggest fantasy show on TV right now. It's hardly a non-starter. But regardless, it's something that happens because of the difficulty of scenarios and how players approach them.

Swinginess is marginally disfavorable to the PCs if you adopt player-centric conceits, but the game is always going to have some swinginess to it. That is to say, if you're going to roll dice at all, sometimes the dice will decide things.



> Balance should never, ever be discrete from how enjoyable a game is.  The whole point of balance is to increase the enjoyment of the game.



But it is discrete from it. Many games have no conception of balance at all. Others have purposeful and extreme imbalances. Balance is only really critical for pure games of strategy, like chess (which even then has purposeful imbalances between the pieces built in).

And D&D is not a strategy game, it's a roleplaying game, to which balance between player choices is somewhere between a tertiary consideration and completely irrelevant. Only because of D&D's wargame heritage is it even mentioned.



> Again, this is why Chutes and Ladders is considered a terrible game.  It's entirely random and no amount of skill will help you.



So it's perfectly balanced and there's no system mastery. And it's a terrible game. The parallel here is pretty obvious: if 4e is what you say it is, it's pretty much the same.

Of course, though it has its limitations, not everyone thinks that Chutes and Ladders (or 4e) terrible because they're deriving enjoyment from something other than the exercise of skill to sway the odds in their favor.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> Well, no. The chance of PC fatality is dependent on the difficulty level and the actions of the players. The rocket tag moniker again simply indicates combat that is fast and swingy, but that can still be slanted in the players' favor.




It is _also_ dependent on the rules of the game and how lethal things actually are.



> Endless PC death sounds pretty archetypically D&D to me.




To me only if you play in some modes.  It's almost anathema for Dragonlance and 2E - Dragonlance literally telling you to fudge the dice.



> But it is discrete from it. Many games have no conception of balance at all. Others have purposeful and extreme imbalances. Balance is only really critical for pure games of strategy, like chess (which even then has purposeful imbalances between the pieces built in).




Balance is information.  Nothing more, nothing less. An imbalanced game doesn't actually tell you how strong threats are.  This is a problem.



> And D&D is not a strategy game, it's a roleplaying game, to which balance between player choices is somewhere between a tertiary consideration and completely irrelevant. Only because of D&D's wargame heritage is it even mentioned.




The two are not mutually exclusive.  D&D is a roleplaying game about players who prepare for then go into ridiculously deadly and unrealistic environments and scavenge what they can.  That second part is a strategy and logistics game with life on the line.



> So it's perfectly balanced and there's no system mastery. And it's a terrible game. The parallel here is pretty obvious: if 4e is what you say it is, it's pretty much the same.




Who says there is no system mastery to 4E?  Whoever does is simply wrong.  4E did not _set out to reward system mastery._  Unlike 3.X.  This is because rewarding players for system mastery is like rewarding players artificially for being tall when they are playing basketball.  The advantage of being tall on a basketball pitch is inherent.  The advantage of system mastery is inherent.  You can not get rid of it.  Artificially further rewarding it through obfuscation is like giving more money to the people who are already rich and taking from the poor to fund it.



> Of course, though it has its limitations, not everyone thinks that Chutes and Ladders (or 4e) terrible because they're deriving enjoyment from something other than the exercise of skill to sway the odds in their favor.




In both 3.X and 4E I derive enjoyment from the exercise of skill.

In 3.X I derive enjoyment from the exercise of skill _in character creation. _But I end up feeling as if I need a shower afterwards - the ways to build a strong character are well known and obvious (spells > mundane, ability to pick saving throw targets is huge).  I also derive enjoyment from _efficient_ tactical play - how few spells can I win the battle with and how little will it take to rig the odds in our favour.

In 4E I derive _more_ enjoyment from the exercise of skill in character creation because I don't end up feeling dirty because using my skill to either create an offbeat build or redline a build won't have me completely overshadowing others.  Further I don't feel anything like as cramped when building a 4e character as when building a 3.X one.  I derive enjoyment from _complex_ tactical play - using tactical positioning and exploiting both deliberately provoking the enemies and the scenery to completely change what is going on in a way I couldn't in different scenarios.  I also derive enjoyment from _flamboyant_ tactical play; tactics I can tell my group hasn't seen coming because only a madman or someone who had an exceptional grasp of the situation would try.   And efficient play in 4E involves taking the enemy down fast and at low risk rather than seeing how many spells I'm not using.  (On the other hand playing 4E with a slow group drives me right up the wall).

Your claim that there is no enjoyment from the exercise of skill in 4E is simply false.  I find there to be many more ways to excercise skill in 4E than 3.PF or 3.5 and it to be more rewarding when you do so.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Still sick of people willfully misinterpreting one sentence by Monte Cook, to imply that 3e deliberately created "bad" feats as some sort of trap for players.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Still sick of people willfully misinterpreting one sentence by Monte Cook, to imply that 3e deliberately created "bad" feats as some sort of trap for players.




I'm pretty sure that:


			
				Monte Cook's deservedly notorious article on Ivory Tower Game Design said:
			
		

> _
> Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others."_



Has only one form of misinterpretation going on.  And that's that Monte Cook doesn't understand Timmy, confusing it instead with Skill Tester Cards - something MTG no longer bothers wasting paper on.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> The terms "fantasy roleplaying game" and "world simulator with rules as physics" are synonyms.



I actually get a lot of amusement out of D&D fans 1) making this claim, 2) deriding 4e as a world-sim failure, and 3) holding up any particular edition as more simmy than the others. It's like hearing a boy scout brag about his go-cart's amazing speed to his boy scout pals. During the Indy 500.

Having a strong simulationist streak, I'm probably unusual among 4e fans, but in any case, I find it much _easier_ to use 4e as a world-sim than any other edition. Whatever sim-issues that 4e presents, I actually find the sim-issues of other editions much harder to reconcile.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Tequila Sunrise said:


> Having a strong simulationist streak, I'm probably unusual among 4e fans, but in any case, I find it much _easier_ to use 4e as a world-sim than any other edition. Whatever sim-issues that 4e presents, I actually find the sim-issues of other editions much harder to reconcile.




You aren't alone here.  4E is the only version of D&D I consider any good as a world sim at all.  Which certainly isn't a criticism of oD&D any more than a cat not barking is a criticism.  The dungeon environment is deliberately very artificial for the purpose of good gameplay.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> I'm pretty sure that:
> 
> Has only one form of misinterpretation going on.  And that's that Monte Cook doesn't understand Timmy, confusing it instead with Skill Tester Cards - something MTG no longer bothers wasting paper on.




But you aren't referencing what Monte said, you're referencing an article that's also misinterpreting what he said.

Yes, it is a M:tG influenced idea, but the principle is that you can't have every card/feat perfectly balanced due to sheer math.  It's not possible.  And if the only feats/cards you print are ones that are average or better, then the average inexorably moves up over time.  So you have to have some feats that are slightly sub-par, or you get power creep.

Monte's point was that this is OK - a feature, not a bug - because it rewards system mastery.  This is not the same thing as "we deliberately make trap feats to trick people who don't min-max their characters correctly".

I don't mind if you disagree with him - but I resent the 3e bashing of "trap feats" the same way some 4e defenders get sick of people mentioning "weapon expertise feat tax" or whatever the phrase is.

I suspect that 5e will also have some abilities or feats that the player base will decide are too weak to use, but as long as no one makes the mistake of saying what Monte did, it'll avoid the same argument.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> But you aren't referencing what Monte said, you're referencing an article that's also misinterpreting what he said.




If the article misinterpreting Monte Cook was written by Monte Cook on his own website then yes I am.  I looked the article up and not any summaries of it before posting.



> Yes, it is a M:tG influenced idea, but the principle is that you can't have every card/feat perfectly balanced due to sheer math.  It's not possible.  And if the only feats/cards you print are ones that are average or better, then the average inexorably moves up over time.  So you have to have some feats that are slightly sub-par, or you get power creep.
> 
> Monte's point was that this is OK - a feature, not a bug - because it rewards system mastery.  This is not the same thing as "we deliberately make trap feats to trick people who don't min-max their characters correctly".




No.  No it isn't.  That isn't what Monte Cook said _at all_.  I have linked the original article Monte Cook wrote above and was quoting it directly.  He did not say "we made some feats better than others because balance wasn't actually possible".  Something I would have respected.  He specifically states that "Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game."



> I don't mind if you disagree with him - but I resent the 3e bashing of "trap feats" the same way some 4e defenders get sick of people mentioning "weapon expertise feat tax" or whatever the phrase is.




And I resent being told that "you're referencing an article that's also misinterpreting what he said" when I specifically took the time to look the article up, to re-read it, to check whether it said anything different from what I remember it saying, and then to quote it directly with a copy and paste from the web.archive.org archive of the article in question.

For third parties reading this, the section in question written by Monte Cook in his own words reads:


			
				Ivory Tower Game Design by Monte Cook said:
			
		

> [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]_Magic_ also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.
> 
> [/FONT]
> [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.)





I will say that something bad mentioned in that article (the very next paragraph) made it through to 4e, and 4e suffered badly because of it.



> There's a third concept that we took from _Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones._



[/FONT]


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> But you aren't referencing what Monte said, you're referencing an article that's also misinterpreting what he said.
> 
> Yes, it is a M:tG influenced idea, but the principle is that you can't have every card/feat perfectly balanced due to sheer math.  It's not possible.  And if the only feats/cards you print are ones that are average or better, then the average inexorably moves up over time.  So you have to have some feats that are slightly sub-par, or you get power creep.
> 
> ...



No, you're buying whole-hog into the Alexandrian's revisionism surrounding that article.  The whole thing is archived:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070613055537/http://montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142

It's pretty clear - they (1) intentionally put less-useful feats in the game, (2) didn't give any guidance as to the better feats or the uses of marginal feats, and (3) he regrets doing that now.

(Also, among most of the 4e fans that I know, "feat taxes" aren't very well-liked at all, and most games hand out Expertise for free in acknowledgement of the math gap. The designers made a design mistake, and it's not cool to make players spend their feats fixing it. 4e fans, as a general rule, are pretty cognizant of the problems with the system, in part because of the game's intentional design transparency. It's just seldom the same problems that edition warriors crow about on message boards.)


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

The relevant sum-up quote is:







> While there's something to be said for just giving gamers the rules to do with as they please, there's just as much to be said for simply giving it to the reader straight in a more honest, conversational approach.



In other words, not remotely what's being suggested here. In fact, what he says regarding relative utility of character options is:







> (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.)



There's nothing in there about "traps" or that would suggest that anything is "broken".


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Thank you, Ahnenois.

The article you (Neonchameleon) cite is his observations six years later, about the problems caused by that statement - not the original statement he made on the subject.  And from his phrasing, I don't think he'd agree with your interpretation of his article.

His criticism of himself is not that he included "bad" feats, but that he didn't explain better in the rules how to select feats, and how some were margin cases or circumstantial.  That's a legitimate criticism of the "system mastery" argument.  He certainly did not say "we deliberately put bad feats in the game to trick newbies, and now we regret that."

I first ran into the argument for weak cards from Mark Rosewater, and when I read Monte's comments I knew he was referring to the same game design logic.  Again, you may disagree - it certainly has an issue about collectible cards vs. permanent rules - but words like "trap feats" and the like, to my mind, ascribe a certain malevolent motive to the man that was definitely not there.

(Oh, and yes, Monte's explanation of "Timmy" cards is wrong and misleading.)


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> The article you (Neonchameleon) cite is his observations six years later, about the problems caused by that statement - not the original statement he made on the subject.  And from his phrasing, I don't think he'd agree with your interpretation of his article.




Given that the article I cite was published on or before March 2005 (that being the earliest date it shows up in the Wayback Machine), I'm curious what you think he said in 1999 - or what you think the original column actually was.



> His criticism of himself is not that he included "bad" feats, but that he didn't explain better in the rules how to select feats, and how some were margin cases or circumstantial.




Indeed.  But he said outright "The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that,_ it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others._"  That is the fact.  Where he criticises himself for this is not where I do.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Given that the article I cite was published on or before March 2005 (that being the earliest date it shows up in the Wayback Machine), I'm curious what you think he said in 1999 - or what you think the original column actually was.




My internet-fu is not as strong as some, but what I recall was some sort of interview, and not particularly an article devoted to the topic.  A passing comment, if you will.



Neonchameleon said:


> Indeed.  But he said outright "The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that,_ it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others._"  That is the fact.  Where he criticises himself for this is not where I do.




Note that (a) the first part refers to his misunderstanding of "Timmy" cards, and (b) the following sentence that D&D doesn't exactly "do that".  Your main point is "c", and I feel that he is saying "we felt it necessary that all feats not be equal, and some would be weak as a result" whereas you seem to feel he is saying "we deliberately chose to make poor feats to skew gameplay according to our theories".  Quoting him at me does not change the fact that I feel you are misunderstanding the meaning of his statement.

Do you feel that it is possible for every feat in a game to be perfectly balanced with every other feat?  Even if you constantly tweaked the rules as time passed?


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> My internet-fu is not as strong as some, but what I recall was some sort of interview, and not particularly an article devoted to the topic.  A passing comment, if you will.




It's not one I'm aware of.



> Note that (a) the first part refers to his misunderstanding of "Timmy" cards, and (b) the following sentence that D&D doesn't exactly "do that".  Your main point is "c", and I feel that he is saying "we felt it necessary that all feats not be equal, and some would be weak as a result" whereas you seem to feel he is saying "we deliberately chose to make poor feats to skew gameplay according to our theories".  Quoting him at me does not change the fact that I feel you are misunderstanding the meaning of his statement.
> 
> Do you feel that it is possible for every feat in a game to be perfectly balanced with every other feat?  Even if you constantly tweaked the rules as time passed?




I consider that you're ignoring the final phrase of the two paragraph section that I have quoted on this thread twice already and am about to quote for a third time. * "**Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game."*

I don't consider perfect balance possible.  I consider it a goal to aim for.  Monte Cook explicitly quite deliberately did not do this.  He ensured that things were deliberately unequal and set out to not design such problems away - in other words set out to ensure that such traps as came up through the design process remained - because they wanted to reward system mastery.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 29, 2014)

And he's really talking about clarity and honesty. The problem with the Toughness feat is that it doesn't actually make you meaningfully tougher, and that the name and the next might mislead a newbie into thinking that it does. Thus, the need for guidance to show people how to select feats. Anyone who understands the game, as he says, realizes how limited and situational the feat is, so it isn't a trap.

The issue of how Toughness compares to Skill Focus or Power Attack or Quicken Spell (i.e. "balance") isn't even at issue.

PF Toughness easily solves this issue by (rather than giving guidance) simply making the feat do what it says it does. Thus the player's intuitive read is now accurate, at 3+1hp/level, you are actually meaningfully tougher. You can still argue whether a feat that just grants hit points is worth taking, but it isn't a trap.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Again, I have no disagreement with Ahnenois' take on this.



Neonchameleon said:


> I consider that you're ignoring the final phrase of the two paragraph section that I have quoted on this thread twice already and am about to quote for a third time. * "**Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game."*
> 
> I don't consider perfect balance possible.  I consider it a goal to aim for.  Monte Cook explicitly quite deliberately did not do this.  He ensured that things were deliberately unequal and set out to not design such problems away - in other words set out to ensure that such traps as came up through the design process remained - because they wanted to reward system mastery.




I consider that you rephrase his statement, with your comment about "quite deliberately did not".  I think that he's saying that the game designers felt that perfection was not achievable and not actually necessary.  You seem to think he was saying it wasn't desirable.  

Another way to translate it would be "we felt that trying too hard for balance would result in all choices feeling blandly identical, and that would be no fun".  I do recall a lot of people making that complaint about another edition.

But to reiterate - I don't want to say you are wrong for feeling that the game has a problem as a result.  I dislike the implication that, as so often comes up in ENWorld arguments, a particular game designer deliberately and malevolently made a design decision counter to the interests of the game and the players as a group.  Monte (and his team) made a decision about game style that a lot of people disagreed with.  Years later he regrets that it caused a problem.  This is hardly a deliberate act of sabotage.


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## Obryn (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I dislike the implication that, as so often comes up in ENWorld arguments, a particular game designer deliberately and malevolently made a design decision counter to the interests of the game and the players as a group.  Monte (and his team) made a decision about game style that a lot of people disagreed with.  Years later he regrets that it caused a problem.  This is hardly a deliberate act of sabotage.



Where is any of this implied? 

You're misreading if you think "Monte malevolently sabotaged the game" is the narrative here.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Where is any of this implied?
> 
> You're misreading if you think "Monte malevolently sabotaged the game" is the narrative here.




Since I'm the one who first commented, no I'm not.  I objected to the idea that Monte deliberately created "bad" feats as a "trap" for players.  If you are disagreeing with me, you're defending that idea.

Phrasing is everything.  I think Monte said, effectively, "some feats are worse than others, and that's OK, and arguably desirable."  And you can disagree with that, but I don't.  But what people seem to interpret it as, would be "haha, we snuck bad feats into the game so that only clever players would figure out how to beat it".  And don't think I'm strawmanning here, because I've heard that tone many a time around these parts.

It's the difference between "I thought putting more salt in the caramel ice cream would make the ice cream taste better, but in hindsight it didn't work so well" and "I'm going to put lots of salt in the ice cream so only the very best ice-cream-eaters will appreciate it".


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I consider that you rephrase his statement, with your comment about "quite deliberately did not".  I think that he's saying that the game designers felt that perfection was not achievable and not actually necessary.  You seem to think he was saying it wasn't desirable.




Indeed.  



> Another way to translate it would be "we felt that trying too hard for balance would result in all choices feeling blandly identical, and that would be no fun".




I consider that to be an _incredible_ stretch from what he actually says by interpolating things he does not mention.  He at no point mentions flavour as a reason for the difference in power, merely rewarding system mastery.  There is literally no way I can get what you claim he is saying from the words he used in the article under discussion.



> But to reiterate - I don't want to say you are wrong for feeling that the game has a problem as a result.  I dislike the implication that, as so often comes up in ENWorld arguments, a particular game designer deliberately and malevolently made a design decision counter to the interests of the game and the players as a group.  Monte (and his team) made a decision about game style that a lot of people disagreed with.  Years later he regrets that it caused a problem.  This is hardly a deliberate act of sabotage.




Oh, I don't think he made it deliberately and malevolently.  He certainly made the choice deliberately - this is not in question.  I also think that the choice was obvious bad design - in short he ed up badly.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Since I'm the one who first commented, no I'm not.  I objected to the idea that Monte deliberately created "bad" feats as a "trap" for players.  If you are disagreeing with me, you're defending that idea.
> 
> Phrasing is everything.  I think Monte said, effectively, "some feats are worse than others, and that's OK, and arguably desirable."




Continue what he said in the way you didn't last time.  "... and it's desirable because it rewards system mastery."



> And you can disagree with that, but I don't.  But what people seem to interpret it as, would be "haha, we snuck bad feats into the game so that only clever players would figure out how to beat it".  And don't think I'm strawmanning here, because I've heard that tone many a time around these parts.
> 
> It's the difference between "I thought putting more salt in the caramel ice cream would make the ice cream taste better, but in hindsight it didn't work so well" and "I'm going to put lots of salt in the ice cream so only the very best ice-cream-eaters will appreciate it".




Once more you are removing his reasoning.  It's closer to "I thought that it would be interesting to mix the flavourings with cream directly for the ice cream.  And this includes the coca-cola and lemon flavours.  In hindsight that didn't work out so well."


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jun 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> I consider that to be an _incredible_ stretch from what he actually says by interpolating things he does not mention.  He at no point mentions flavour as a reason for the difference in power, merely rewarding system mastery.  There is literally no way I can get what you claim he is saying from the words he used in the article under discussion.




I disagree - I think my interpretation is valid.  Moving on.





Neonchameleon said:


> Oh, I don't think he made it deliberately and malevolently.  He certainly made the choice deliberately - this is not in question.  I also think that the choice was obvious bad design - in short he ed up badly.




Then defend this point, instead of arguing about who interpreted his statement which way.  The key phrase being "obvious bad design" - when I feel it's more of a case of "Neonchameleon and others don't like it".  "Obvious bad design" would be "what idiot put the handbrake behind the gear shift" - whereas this is more of a "I thought a push-button dashboard would be neat, popular and effective, but it turned out to be otherwise".

Seems to me it's just a matter of degree, on how much you and Monte feel balance is possible and necessary.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I disagree - I think my interpretation is valid.  Moving on.




He gives _one specific reason_.  Your reason is something completely different.

*"Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game."*



> Then defend this point, instead of arguing about who interpreted his statement which way.  The key phrase being "obvious bad design" - when I feel it's more of a case of "Neonchameleon and others don't like it".  "Obvious bad design" would be "what idiot put the handbrake behind the gear shift" - whereas this is more of a "I thought a push-button dashboard would be neat, popular and effective, but it turned out to be otherwise".
> 
> Seems to me it's just a matter of degree, on how much you and Monte feel balance is possible and necessary.




Not in the slightest.  Monte Cook _never mentioned whether he thought balance was possible._  He says that"Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design [imbalance] away".  And they did not try because "we wanted to reward mastery of the game."

It's not an aesthetic choice he's talking about.  It's not a worldbuilding choice.  It's not a flavour choice.  It's a choice to reward one small subset of players who will already be automatically rewarded by understanding what works.


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## Hussar (Jun 29, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> /snip
> 
> But it is discrete from it. Many games have no conception of balance at all. Others have purposeful and extreme imbalances. Balance is only really critical for pure games of strategy, like chess (which even then has purposeful imbalances between the pieces built in).
> 
> ...




Again swimming upthread.  Name three.  Name three games which have no conception of balance at all.  Chess is about as balanced as it can be.  Yes, not all pieces are equal, but, both sides are perfectly equal.  The only difference here is player skill.

If you think balance between player choices is a tertiary consideration, you haven't actually read a whole lot of RPG books.  Balance is a primary concern, even going back to 1e.  Let me ask you this, then.  If balance isn't a concern, why do classes have different xp requirements in AD&D?  What's the justification, if it isn't balance?


----------



## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> All characters have an approximate strength and toughness and behave as they do in the world.  But the camera is almost invariably following the PCs.  The map is displayed at _whatever scale the PCs are at the time_  This doesn't mean that the underlying reality has changed, any more than switching from a Mercator to a Peters Projection or a Waterman Butterfly changes the world.  The game mechanics aren't the laws of the world - they are a map reflecting what is going on in the world.
> 
> Neon-"But we don't actually roll it out when the PCs aren't there"-Chameleon



However, let's say I look at a map of Canada/USA.  Vancouver, LA, Chicago, Montreal - they're all there just like they should be.  But the PCs are in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, so I zero in on that bit of the map and bring it in way closer.  The fact I'm now looking only at the map of Lake Geneva doesn't invalidate the map of Vancouver's existence, nor does it invalidate Vancouver itself - it's still there, even though I can't see it on a map of Lake Geneva.

Same thing with NPCs - the 5th-level NPC Cleric the party bought cures from last night was a 5th-level Cleric yesterday morning and is still a 5th-level Cleric today even though she might - for all we know - never interact with the PCs again.  The laws of the game dictate what her being a 5th-level Cleric represents in terms of abilities, h.p., etc; and she's reflected as such on the map whether you happen to be looking at that particular bit of the map at the moment or not.

Put another way, if a bar brawl starts before the PCs walk into town, then the PCs arrive and interact with it somehow, absolutely nothing should change about the parameters of the original brawl.  Sure, more dice are going to get rolled if the PCs interact with things than if they don't, but from the point of view of a participant in the original brawl the presence or absence of a PC (who, for sake of discussion, does nothing but stand back and watch) should make no observable difference at all to what happens.

Lan-"brawling with a 5th-level Cleric in Vancouver"-efan


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> If you think balance between player choices is a tertiary consideration, you haven't actually read a whole lot of RPG books.  Balance is a primary concern, even going back to 1e.  Let me ask you this, then.  If balance isn't a concern, why do classes have different xp requirements in AD&D?  What's the justification, if it isn't balance?




What do you mean "even going back to 1e".  Balance was a primary concern long before 1e.

From The Strategic Review volume 2, Issue 2 - April 1976



			
				Originally written by Gary Gygax said:
			
		

> Magic-use was thereby to be powerful enough to enable its followers to compete with any other type of player-character, and yet the use of magic would not be so great as to make those using it overshadow all others. This was the conception, but in practice it did not work out as planned. Primarily at fault is the game itself which does not carefully explain the reasoning behind the magic system. Also, the various magic items for employment by magic-users tend to make them too powerful in relation to other classes (although the GREYHAWK supplement took steps to correct this somewhat).
> 
> ...
> 
> *The logic behind it all was drawn from game balance as much as from anything else. *Fighters have their strength, weapons, and armor to aid them in their competition. Magic-users must rely upon their spells, as they have virtually no weaponry or armor to protect them. Clerics combine some of the advantages of the other two classes. The new class, thieves, have the basic advantage of stealthful actions with some additions in order for them to successfully operate on a plane with other character types. If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player-characters. *It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals.​*


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## Hussar (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> However, let's say I look at a map of Canada/USA.  Vancouver, LA, Chicago, Montreal - they're all there just like they should be.  But the PCs are in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, so I zero in on that bit of the map and bring it in way closer.  The fact I'm now looking only at the map of Lake Geneva doesn't invalidate the map of Vancouver's existence, nor does it invalidate Vancouver itself - it's still there, even though I can't see it on a map of Lake Geneva.
> 
> Same thing with NPCs - the 5th-level NPC Cleric the party bought cures from last night was a 5th-level Cleric yesterday morning and is still a 5th-level Cleric today even though she might - for all we know - never interact with the PCs again.  The laws of the game dictate what her being a 5th-level Cleric represents in terms of abilities, h.p., etc; and she's reflected as such on the map whether you happen to be looking at that particular bit of the map at the moment or not.
> 
> ...




But, that bar brawl most likely only occurred in the DM's head.  No dice were rolled, and absolutely no game mechanics were engaged to determine the results of that brawl.  I mean, probably there would be broken chairs lying around the bar right?  Did the DM roll for those to be broken?  If they were used as weapons, they shouldn't break at all, since weapons don't take damage when used as weapons.  So, how did the chairs get broken?

And, the only person who knows the level of that cleric is the DM.  No one in the game world knows, unless you buy into the idea that level is a real thing.  That 5th level cleric can be any level I want him/her to be whenever I need him/her to be whatever level.  Or are you saying that the DM can never change an NPC behind the scenes?  Anything in the DM's notes is now carved in stone, never to be revised?

I've certainly never seen anyone who plays like that.  Setting revisions happen all the time.  So long as it doesn't contradict anything established at the table, who cares?


----------



## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Obryn said:


> If you have a kobold PC, he's going to have however many hit points a PC of his class, level, and stats would normally have. If it's being treated as a minion, a kobold has 1. I don't see what the problem is? I mean, those minion kobolds are just imaginary and who cares what _you_ imagine _they_ might imagine? They're not the PCs, because no players are playing them.



In truth, someone *is* playing them: the DM; and while the usual DM might not bother getting in the heads of each little Kobold to find out what it's thinking the possibility of doing so is and always has been present in the game.

Put another way, the PCs are every bit as imaginary as the minion kobolds.



> Things "off screen" have no hit points, since hit points are a gameplay convenience and stuff "off screen" is, by definition, not being played at the time and thus needs no gameplay convenience.



Gameplay convenience suggests that off-screen things carry their stats with them at all times as they could become on-screen at a second's notice.  The Ogre hiding in ambush in its cave has 45 h.p. before the party meet it, 45 h.p. when the party meet it (though probably not after the party meet it!) and 45 h.p. if the party never meet it at all.

And while if you know the party are never going to meet it you might not bother rolling up its actual h.p. total it still undeniably *has* a h.p. total; you just don't know what the actual number is. 



> And the PCs deserve to be treated differently because (1) real people are playing them at a game table, presumably to have a good time, and (2) they are in 99% of all play time, so they're clearly more important than anything else. Who would hand someone a 8th level character with 1 hit point? That sounds like a terrible thing to do to your friends!



It's not a very nice thing to do to the DM either, yet 4e consistently wants to hand her 8 HD (or 8th level) monsters with 1 h.p. that should, by virtue of their Con. score and natural toughness, have a lot more than 1.

Lan-"redefining the one-hit wonder"-efan


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> However, let's say I look at a map of Canada/USA.  Vancouver, LA, Chicago, Montreal - they're all there just like they should be.  But the PCs are in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, so I zero in on that bit of the map and bring it in way closer.  The fact I'm now looking only at the map of Lake Geneva doesn't invalidate the map of Vancouver's existence, nor does it invalidate Vancouver itself - it's still there, even though I can't see it on a map of Lake Geneva.
> 
> Same thing with NPCs - the 5th-level NPC Cleric the party bought cures from last night was a 5th-level Cleric yesterday morning and is still a 5th-level Cleric today even though she might - for all we know - never interact with the PCs again.  The laws of the game dictate what her being a 5th-level Cleric represents in terms of abilities, h.p., etc; and she's reflected as such on the map whether you happen to be looking at that particular bit of the map at the moment or not.
> 
> ...




The above is all based on two premises, both of which I find artificial.
1: Levels have a direct rather than an indirect meaning in the game world
2: Everyone develops the same way.

The NPC cleric will always be someone who has been empowered by the Gods.  He won't change.  But the Gods don't normally do production-line empowerment, and unless you actively go adventuring becoming higher in the favour of your deity does not automatically equate to getting better at wielding a sword.  The term 5th level may refer to his level of initiation in a mystery cult - but does not necessarily refer directly to anything in the gameworld.

The NPC cleric is a person with relationships, skills, and divine abilities.  And ultimately is too complex to trap in a simple statblock.  Any more than writing Lanefan, Level 0 CN Human (or whatever) captures the reality of Lanefan.

And I wouldn't want to straightjacket you to the rules of any RPG.

As for the bar brawl, very little changes whether the PCs are there or not.  Or everything changes because the PCs are scary interlopers.


----------



## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Again swimming upthread.  Name three.  Name three games which have no conception of balance at all.



House, Whose Line is it Anyway, and Sim City.

And, for that matter, most roleplaying games. Does anyone look at d20 Modern and think that a strong hero is balanced with a charismatic hero? That a CoC professor of archaeology is balanced with a soldier? That a BSG knuckledragger is balanced with a fighter pilot? Of course not. They're different animals entirely, and their usefulness is dependent on circumstance. Why someone would expect anything different from their D&D equivalents is an ongoing question. The kind of balance you're getting at is not inherent to the concept of roleplaying games but is really grafted on to serve a particular traditionalist element.



> Chess is about as balanced as it can be.  Yes, not all pieces are equal, but, both sides are perfectly equal.  The only difference here is player skill.



Yes, exactly. That's the way in which 4e isn't balanced; it's apparently only concerned with making the pieces equal, not between the players and their opposition. A version of chess in which all the pieces on one side were knights (and on the other side they were all the normal layout) would be, as you're defining it, more "balanced".



> If you think balance between player choices is a tertiary consideration, you haven't actually read a whole lot of RPG books.  Balance is a primary concern, even going back to 1e.  Let me ask you this, then.  If balance isn't a concern, why do classes have different xp requirements in AD&D?  What's the justification, if it isn't balance?



Probably to make magic seem more exclusive and esoteric because it's harder to learn. But even if such a rule was created with the sole purpose of balancing those classes, it would only prove my point, as it's a rather tangential tacked on (and inherently optional) element after all the class abilities and core mechanics have already been built.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Gameplay convenience suggests that off-screen things carry their stats with them at all times as they could become on-screen at a second's notice.  The Ogre hiding in ambush in its cave has 45 h.p. before the party meet it, 45 h.p. when the party meet it (though probably not after the party meet it!) and 45 h.p. if the party never meet it at all.




This much is true in 4E.  You only reset the zoom _at most_ once every four levels.



> And while if you know the party are never going to meet it you might not bother rolling up its actual h.p. total it still undeniably *has* a h.p. total; you just don't know what the actual number is.




No.  No it doesn't.  The ogre has _a physical form_.  Hit points aren't an inherent part of the game world.  Hit points are about as real as contour lines on a map.  And the ogre's game mechanics are a representation of this.  Which doesn't mean they should be the same for all purposes.


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## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This really is the fundamental issue isn't it?  That one group of players wants the mechanics to be able to be applied regardless of the presence of players or not.  The DM might not roll the encounter, and very much most likely won't.  The orcs ambush the caravan and kill the guards and burn the caravan.  We don't bother actually rolling through that without the players present.  But, it has to be possible.



Exactly!



> To me, the mechanics are only required when there are player's present.  Any other time, it's pure free form and whatever I want to happen, happens.  For example, in my next adventure, a bunch of demonic constructs have bubbled out of the crypt beneath an abbey and killed everyone.  That's what has happened.  I'm certainly not going to try to actually roll it out.  Heck, I don't even know how many priests were in the abbey at the time.  It's not important.



If the PCs are never going to interact with any of it, sure - free-form it.  But keep in mind that if the PCs ever do interact with it you'll want to know how much damage the priests inflicted on the constructs on their way out, whether or not any of the priests got any sort of warning out, etc., etc.; and those results probably should be within the boundaries of what could happen if it all *was* rolled out.



> My very serious question though is, if this is what you want, why on earth do you play D&D?  D&D has never, ever actually presented this as a way of play.  Play has always assumed that anything off screen is done free form.



Perhaps, but I've always assumed at least some correlation to the game mechanics for the small stuff such that whatever comes of the free-form is at least possible within the mechanics. (when gods etc. get involved who knows what's gonna happen, but that's another thing entirely)



> If you think it was, what AD&D, or OD&D mechanics account for the Rain of Colorless Fire?



No idea.  In fact, I've no idea what the "Rain of Colorless Fire" is. (if it's something out of a setting canon, it's something I've ignored) 

Lanefan


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## Hussar (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> /snip
> 
> Probably to make magic seem more exclusive and esoteric because it's harder to learn. But even if such a rule was created with the sole purpose of balancing those classes, it would only prove my point, as it's a rather tangential tacked on (and inherently optional) element after all the class abilities and core mechanics have already been built.




See, this is why it's so hard to have this conversation.  FIGHTERS need more xp than casters in AD&D.  How in the heck are the XP requirements tangential or inherently optional?  This is a new one.  You're now claiming that the Xp requirements for different classes is an optional rule and there exists some form of standardised advancement table in AD&D?  That's a neat trick.  Could you point it out to me, I'm having a bit of a tough time finding it.



			
				Lanefan said:
			
		

> No idea. In fact, I've no idea what the "Rain of Colorless Fire" is. (if it's something out of a setting canon, it's something I've ignored)
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=6323384#ixzz364dkMZso




The Rain of Colorless Fire is a seminal event in the development of Greyhawk and is the primary motivator for how most of the nations in Greyhawk came to be.  IOW, it's probably the biggest single event in Greyhawk's history.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> House, Whose Line is it Anyway, and Sim City.




Whose Line Is It Anyway isn't a game.  It's the name of an improv comedy show.  House, I've no idea about.  Sim City is a solo game - and it's balanced the way solo games are, meaning that there is no one dominant strategy.



> And, for that matter, most roleplaying games. Does anyone look at d20 Modern and think that a strong hero is balanced with a charismatic hero? That a CoC professor of archaeology is balanced with a soldier? That a BSG knuckledragger is balanced with a fighter pilot? Of course not. They're different animals entirely, and their usefulness is dependent on circumstance.




In terms of overall usefulness yes I believe they ought to be. 



> Why someone would expect anything different from their D&D equivalents is an ongoing question




"*The logic behind it all was drawn from game balance as much as from anything else. *Fighters have their strength, weapons, and armor to aid them in their competition. Magic-users must rely upon their spells, as they have virtually no weaponry or armor to protect them. Clerics combine some of the advantages of the other two classes. The new class, thieves, have the basic advantage of stealthful actions with some additions in order for them to successfully operate on a plane with other character types. If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player-characters. *It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals.​*"
- Gary Gygax, _The Strategic Review_

I've already quoted this a few posts ago.



> Yes, exactly. That's the way in which 4e isn't balanced; it's apparently only concerned with making the pieces equal, not between the players and their opposition. A version of chess in which all the pieces on one side were knights (and on the other side they were all the normal layout) would be, as you're defining it, more "balanced".




You confuse balance with symmetry.  4E is _asymmetric_.  Like e.g. Fox and Geese.  Or any wargame I can think of.  Or any fighting game.  4e is balanced between PCs like a fighting game.  (Who's stronger?  Any good fighting game will have a lot of viable fighters) and between PCs and NPCs like Fox and Geese.  These are both forms of balance.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 30, 2014)

If you think about it, a focus on balance is kind of against the spirit of D&D.

The concept of balance under discussion really applies mostly between different PCs and their builds.  The concern is the possible resentment if one PC out-performs another, or if one PC is noticeably weaker.  You can't "balance" a fight between four PCs and a huge dragon - you can only try to make it a fair fight.

In the D&D game in spirit, the PCs are supposed to be a team, not competing with one another for who does more damage to the monster.  Who cares if the thief did much damage to the skeletons - we wouldn't have gotten the secret door open without him.

I'd say balance is not nearly as important to game design as making sure a thing you designed does what you and your players expect from it.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> If the PCs are never going to interact with any of it, sure - free-form it.  But keep in mind that if the PCs ever do interact with it you'll want to know how much damage the priests inflicted on the constructs on their way out, whether or not any of the priests got any sort of warning out, etc., etc.; and those results probably should be within the boundaries of what could happen if it all *was* rolled out.




So basically you estimate based on the strengths of the sides how battered the winning side gets?  I can live with that. _And you can do exactly the same thing without needing the exact mechanics as long as the strengths are realistically known_.



> Perhaps, but I've always assumed at least some correlation to the game mechanics for the small stuff such that whatever comes of the free-form is at least possible within the mechanics.




4E has this.


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## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> The thing is, I don't think it does fall apart. When the view of hit points is that their inflation is caused by the increasing skill/magic/luck of the target - it is for all humanoids - then 4e minions make some sense, in that they're supposed to be employed only when their "base form" is thoroughly outclassed by the PCs. The tricks they've learnt to avoid dying aren't good enough any more, and their hit points drop accordingly. Very simply, competing in your own class gives even results, competing against much weaker or much stronger opponents and you'll look like a god/chump accordingly. So, Minions (and Solos and Elites).



Which again destroys consistency.  Let's take a "base form" Giant as an example, and make him a suitable opponent for about 12th-level types...then see what happens against parties of widely-varying level:

If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party that same Giant has to have 95 h.p. against a 20th-level party, even though those 95 aren't going to last nearly as long.

If a Giant (Minion) has 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then that same Giant has to have 1 h.p. against a 3rd-level party, whcih is ridiculous, of course.

If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party but that same Giant has but 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then your game-world's mechanical consistency just went out the window; also ridiculous.

Lan-"this is all a hazard of there being too much difference between low level and high"-efan


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> If you think about it, a focus on balance is kind of against the spirit of D&D.




This would be some version of D&D that has nothing to do with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson?  For the third time on this thread:

"*The logic behind it all was drawn from game balance as much as from anything else. *Fighters have their strength, weapons, and armor to aid them in their competition. Magic-users must rely upon their spells, as they have virtually no weaponry or armor to protect them. Clerics combine some of the advantages of the other two classes. The new class, thieves, have the basic advantage of stealthful actions with some additions in order for them to successfully operate on a plane with other character types. If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player-characters. *It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals.​*"
- Gary Gygax, _The Strategic Review_


----------



## Obryn (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> In truth, someone *is* playing them: the DM; and while the usual DM might not bother getting in the heads of each little Kobold to find out what it's thinking the possibility of doing so is and always has been present in the game.
> 
> Put another way, the PCs are every bit as imaginary as the minion kobolds.



Of course the PCs are every bit as imaginary as the minion kobolds. The difference is that players are playing PCs, and therefore the PCs are a heck of a lot more important and therefore have a special status in the game.

For example, Alice can use Diplomacy for her PC, Shalestra, to convince the NPC King Plotdevice to send troops to aid you. On the other hand, Alice can't have Shalestra use Diplomacy to convince Bob's PC, Duncan, to send his henchmen. Why? Because Bob deserves a lot more agency over his PC than the DM deserves over King Plotdevice's attitude and well-being.



> Gameplay convenience suggests that off-screen things carry their stats with them at all times as they could become on-screen at a second's notice.  The Ogre hiding in ambush in its cave has 45 h.p. before the party meet it, 45 h.p. when the party meet it (though probably not after the party meet it!) and 45 h.p. if the party never meet it at all.
> 
> And while if you know the party are never going to meet it you might not bother rolling up its actual h.p. total it still undeniably *has* a h.p. total; you just don't know what the actual number is.



Why does the hit point total of an ogre the party never meets matter? An assassin can kill King Plotdevice with a crossbow off-screen and nobody needs to worry about 'hit points' at all.



> It's not a very nice thing to do to the DM either, yet 4e consistently wants to hand her 8 HD (or 8th level) monsters with 1 h.p. that should, by virtue of their Con. score and natural toughness, have a lot more than 1.



The DM has - or should have - no investment in the well-being of individual kobolds. The DM is playing the game, but is not one of the players with a PC of their own. (Unless they're running a DMPC, which is terrible for all the reasons I'm laying out here re: investment in the well-being of what should be an NPC.) I find this claim of "being nice to the DM" really suspect. 



Lanefan said:


> If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party that same Giant has to have 95 h.p. against a 20th-level party, even though those 95 aren't going to last nearly as long.
> 
> If a Giant (Minion) has 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then that same Giant has to have 1 h.p. against a 3rd-level party, whcih is ridiculous, of course.
> 
> If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party but that same Giant has but 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then your game-world's mechanical consistency just went out the window; also ridiculous.



Hahah, what? Why's it ridiculous? Because you said so?  Like hit points are a physical characteristic of fictional beings?

"Hit points" are just a gameplay convenience, and if the party should be mowing through them at 20th level, giving them 1 hp is dandy. You've successfully modeled what you were trying to model.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> If you think about it, a focus on balance is kind of against the spirit of D&D.



Balance in the sense of parity of options for player characters anyway. It's very important, for example, that the game be balanced in such a way that the PCs can't do ridiculous things that ruin the game world. For example, if every PC had the ability to disintegrate objects by touch at level 1, they'd all be perfectly balanced with each other, but in the broader context, they'd all be equally overpowered.

The same rationale applies to things like healing. If characters can heal themselves instantaneously, that's overpowered, even (and perhaps especially) if every PC can do it.

But yes, the conceit that a bard and a barbarian are supposed to be of equal usefulness is really absurd, and one that's been vastly overemphasized throughout D&D's lifespan.


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## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> See, this is why it's so hard to have this conversation.  FIGHTERS need more xp than casters in AD&D.



Depends what level range you're talking about.  At low level Clerics advance faster than Fighters and both advance faster than MU's, if memory serves.  At high level I seem to recall Fighters slow down quite a lot for some reason, relative to other classes.


> The Rain of Colorless Fire is a seminal event in the development of Greyhawk and is the primary motivator for how most of the nations in Greyhawk came to be.  IOW, it's probably the biggest single event in Greyhawk's history.



Ah, so part of the canonical history (which I 99% don't use even if running a pre-fab setting) of a setting I've never used.  No wonder I've never heard of it. 

Lanefan


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> SHow in the heck are the XP requirements tangential or inherently optional?  This is a new one.  You're now claiming that the Xp requirements for different classes is an optional rule and there exists some form of standardised advancement table in AD&D?  That's a neat trick.  Could you point it out to me, I'm having a bit of a tough time finding it.



Probably because you're looking. And looking for something that isn't really relevant to the point I was making. The lack of such a table is a limitation of the system, but it hardly means that XP is required

It's not as if everyone who played 2e used XP tables. Leveling up whenever the DM feels like it, let alone any number of more in-depth alternate approaches, is not something that was invented post-Y2K.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Which again destroys consistency.  Let's take a "base form" Giant as an example, and make him a suitable opponent for about 12th-level types...then see what happens against parties of widely-varying level:
> 
> If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party that same Giant has to have 95 h.p. against a 20th-level party, even though those 95 aren't going to last nearly as long.
> 
> ...




*headdesk*

Let's look at what actually happens in the game world.

A family of L12 clone-giants with 146hp face off against four L12 PCs.  It's a tough fight.

A single giant from that family goes terrorising through the village 1st level PCs live in.  The giant in question is utterly overwhelming to the PCs, and focussing on _destroying the village_.  It behaves differently.  It also should be given a lot more focus than the average giants because it's a career defining moment - when the PCs rise to the challenge to kill the giant they can individually barely scratch the hide of.  It's a solo with 184 hit points.  But hit points are not directly a thing.

As a solo its relationship to the PCs in terms of power doesn't really change.  But the regular giants aren't likely to stop to snack on PCs or NPCs - if they tried any of that sort of nonsense the PCs would use their magic swords to stab them through the palette and end them.  Against barely trained farmboys?  That sort of nonsense is fun.

And at Level 20, the PCs finally reach the Giant Cloning Facility.  The Exarch of Orcus is busy cranking the things out.  But the PCs are now experienced giant-fighters.  They have hamstringing and opening the femoral artery down to a fine art.  And are alert enough they can easily dodge the giants most of the time.  The giants are not going to hit on less than a 19; the PCs have the equivalent of AC-10 against THAC0 10 foes.  But a battering from giants is still a battering.  You make the pests into minions _and their threat level against the PCs again doesn't change_

The XP values remain constant, the threat ratings remain constant.   And because these remain constant it's easier to work out how battered the two sides were in a fight than it is in AD&D.


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## Hussar (Jun 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> If you think about it, a focus on balance is kind of against the spirit of D&D.
> 
> The concept of balance under discussion really applies mostly between different PCs and their builds.  The concern is the possible resentment if one PC out-performs another, or if one PC is noticeably weaker.  You can't "balance" a fight between four PCs and a huge dragon - you can only try to make it a fair fight.
> 
> ...




((Side note, NeonC, you keep writing in different colours which show up as black on black background.  It's really hard to read))

The point of balance is to ensure that no single option is clearly better than all other options.  By making a fight between 4 PC's and a huge dragon a fair fight, you've just ensured game balance.  That's the only way to do it.  And, by fair fight, we generally mean that the PC's are going to win.  Yes, there are outliers where the PC's lose, but, by and large, they do win.  An EL par encounter in 3e isn't a guaranteed win.  It just means that most of the time the PC's will win and use up X amount of resources doing so.

Without game balance, you have no way of predicting how an encounter will fall out.  Which makes it that much harder to develop encounters, let alone campaigns.  The only way to design a game so that it does what you and your players expect it to do is to have balance.  That's the only way to achieve a level of predictability  that will allow you to have a game that you want to play over the long term.  Purely random games, like say, Chute and Ladders are very poor for any sort of long term play since it's entirely random - no game balance at all.


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## Der-Rage (Jun 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> If you think about it, a focus on balance is kind of against the spirit of D&D.
> 
> The concept of balance under discussion really applies mostly between different PCs and their builds.  The concern is the possible resentment if one PC out-performs another, or if one PC is noticeably weaker.  You can't "balance" a fight between four PCs and a huge dragon - you can only try to make it a fair fight.
> 
> ...



Which incidentally is exactly what Rob Heinsoo was going for with his 4E design goals. 

Regardless of whether he succeded for you, the point is not 'equality' between the classes. Hell, I ran a 4E game yesterday. The Sorceror and Ranger in the party did upwards of 300 damage to the monsters. The Invoker took another 50 each off two monsters that happened to be vulnerable to her Radiant damage attack. The Battlemind did about 18. I don't think the Swordmage or the Cleric actually hit anyone. Nobody complains about this because it's not about how much damage is dealt but that every player can provide a meaingful contribution. The Ranger was Dazed and Restrained, so the Swordmage teleported her in range of the Cleric, who gave the Ranger a divine boon to save against the status effects. The Battlemind didn't hurt anything much, but he kept the heat from the huge great-axe weilding construct off of the squishy members of the party.  Not everyone contributes the same thing in the same measure, but everyone contributes. 

Contrast this to a 3.X game. Fighters, even though they can eventually rack up high damage, are thwarted by the deep pools of HP high level monsters have, and by spells for which their saves are inadequate. Barbarians, even with all their rages, will never be able to simply walk around AC and HP and shift Tiamat to the Demiplane of Infinite Nuclear Fission.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> ((Side note, NeonC, you keep writing in different colours which show up as black on black background.  It's really hard to read))




((Sorry.  It happens when I cut and paste from actual sources in order to demonstrate my points - apparently ENWorld keeps the colours)).


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jun 30, 2014)

> Purely random games, like say, Chute and Ladders are very poor for any sort of long term play since it's entirely random - no game balance at all.




[_NITPICK_]While I agree with your assessment of the long-term playability of Chutes & Ladders due to its randomness, I would have to say it is perfectly balanced- each player has identical odds of any roll or sequence of rolls.[_/NITPICK_]


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## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Of course the PCs are every bit as imaginary as the minion kobolds. The difference is that players are playing PCs, and therefore the PCs are a heck of a lot more important and therefore have a special status in the game.
> 
> For example, Alice can use Diplomacy for her PC, Shalestra, to convince the NPC King Plotdevice to send troops to aid you. On the other hand, Alice can't have Shalestra use Diplomacy to convince Bob's PC, Duncan, to send his henchmen. Why? Because Bob deserves a lot more agency over his PC than the DM deserves over King Plotdevice's attitude and well-being.



Funny, I just had this very discussion with one of my players at brunch today; he thinks a PC *should* be able to use Charisma-based abilities to convince other PCs to do stuff.  I disagree, but I also disagree that a good Diplomacy roll should trump lousy roleplaying on the part of Shelestra's player.



> The DM has - or should have - no investment in the well-being of individual kobolds. The DM is playing the game, but is not one of the players with a PC of their own.



Realistically, the DM should have an interest in the well-being of every NPC out there just like the players care about their PCs.  Most don't bother with this because it's an awful lot of effort trying to come up with motivations, dreams, goals, and life experiences for a bajillion NPCs; but using the example of King Plotdevice I as DM should have a pretty good handle on what makes him tick and am then going to make sure I roleplay to suit what's in his best interest.


> (Unless they're running a DMPC, which is terrible for all the reasons I'm laying out here re: investment in the well-being of what should be an NPC.)



In truth every creature met in the game world is a DMPC of some sort.

A character in the game world is no less a living, breathing (imaginary) entity just because it doesn't have a player attached.  To think otherwise cheapens the setting and devalues the richness of the game.



> "Hit points" are just a gameplay convenience, and if the party should be mowing through them at 20th level, giving them 1 hp is dandy. You've successfully modeled what you were trying to model.



I've successfully modelled it, yes, at cost of internal consistency and believability.

If the party's going to mow through the monsters anyway why not just leave the monsters with their normal h.p. values for Con. and HD (or level)?

Lan-"every creature tells a story"-efan


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> In truth every creature met in the game world is a DMPC of some sort.
> 
> A character in the game world is no less a living, breathing (imaginary) entity just because it doesn't have a player attached.  To think otherwise cheapens the setting and devalues the richness of the game.



Indeed. The DM is playing those characters. All of them. Roleplaying isn't just something that applies to one particular group of player characters.


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## Savage Wombat (Jun 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The point of balance is to ensure that no single option is clearly better than all other options.  By making a fight between 4 PC's and a huge dragon a fair fight, you've just ensured game balance.  That's the only way to do it.  And, by fair fight, we generally mean that the PC's are going to win.  Yes, there are outliers where the PC's lose, but, by and large, they do win.  An EL par encounter in 3e isn't a guaranteed win.  It just means that most of the time the PC's will win and use up X amount of resources doing so.




But the dragon doesn't have to be "balanced" against the PCs the way PCs are "balanced" against each other.  It doesn't matter if the dragon has 100 times the HP of the party, as long as it doesn't do enough damage to kill them before they have a chance to kill it.  It doesn't matter if the dragon can kill the PCs in three rounds if it's weak enough to be killed in two if they play correctly.  What matters it whether the monster has the necessary stats to provide the outcome the DM requires - a hard fight, one the party could lose but probably won't.

The phrase "game balance" may be too general a term.  And in any case, perfect balance is still something unreasonably difficult to achieve - good balance is usually more than good enough.


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## Lanefan (Jun 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Let's look at what actually happens in the game world.
> 
> A family of L12 clone-giants with 146hp face off against four L12 PCs.  It's a tough fight.
> 
> A single giant from that family goes terrorising through the village 1st level PCs live in.  The giant in question is utterly overwhelming to the PCs, and focussing on _destroying the village_.  It behaves differently.  It also should be given a lot more focus than the average giants because it's a career defining moment - when the PCs rise to the challenge to kill the giant they can individually barely scratch the hide of.  It's a solo with 184 hit points.  But hit points are not directly a thing.



Yes they are.  Hit points are every bit as much a part of a game-world creature's (or PC's) makeup as strength, wisdom, and AC.  They're a part of what you are, their full potential changing as you advance in age/experience/whatever and their actual value changing as you take damage/injury and recover from such.



> And at Level 20, the PCs finally reach the Giant Cloning Facility.  The Exarch of Orcus is busy cranking the things out.  But the PCs are now experienced giant-fighters.  They have hamstringing and opening the femoral artery down to a fine art.  And are alert enough they can easily dodge the giants most of the time.  The giants are not going to hit on less than a 19; the PCs have the equivalent of AC-10 against THAC0 10 foes.  But a battering from giants is still a battering.  You make the pests into minions _and their threat level against the PCs again doesn't change_



A-a-and here's where it goes off the rails again.

Even at 20th level nobody is going to reliably give out 146 h.p. damage on any hit (either that, or the numbers bloat has got *completely* out of hand!).  That's what these clone-Giants had when you met 'em at 12th-level and that's what they should have now; which means giving them only 1 h.p. in fact reduces their threat level considerably as they (on average) won't be around as long as they would if they had their real h.p. (146) and thus will have fewer chances to roll that 19.

And of course the obvious way to shatter this beyond recovery is to have your high-Dex. character (who can hit on a whim) whipping daggers at the enemies before or while charging into combat; all it takes is 1 point damage from the dagger and down goes the minion...a single thrown dagger should realistically never bring down a Giant no matter how good your crit. roll is. 



> The XP values remain constant, the threat ratings remain constant.   And because these remain constant it's easier to work out how battered the two sides were in a fight than it is in AD&D.



A creature's h.p. are part of its xp calculation in my system; and as I've mentioned already the threat does not remain constant when you minionize them.

Lan-"I have no idea how area-effect damage magic interacts with minions but I'm going to guess it isn't pretty"-efan


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Yes they are.  Hit points are every bit as much a part of a game-world creature's (or PC's) makeup as strength, wisdom, and AC.




In other words about as much part of the game world as IQ is part of the real world.  Something that measures something - but doesn't explain it all.



> They're a part of what you are, their full potential changing as you advance in age/experience/whatever and their actual value changing as you take damage/injury and recover from such.
> 
> A-a-and here's where it goes off the rails again.
> 
> Even at 20th level nobody is going to reliably give out 146 h.p. damage on any hit (either that, or the numbers bloat has got *completely* out of hand!).  That's what these clone-Giants had when you met 'em at 12th-level and that's what they should have now; which means giving them only 1 h.p. in fact reduces their threat level considerably as they (on average) won't be around as long as they would if they had their real h.p. (146) and thus will have fewer chances to roll that 19.




You're missing things I've explained before.  The minion giants don't need to roll 19.  They need to roll 11.  The combat is faster and more brutal rather than mostly involving the PCs ignoring the giants because the giants won't actually hurt them.



> And of course the obvious way to shatter this beyond recovery is to have your high-Dex. character (who can hit on a whim) whipping daggers at the enemies before or while charging into combat; all it takes is 1 point damage from the dagger and down goes the minion...a single thrown dagger should realistically never bring down a Giant no matter how good your crit. roll is.




And this is a matter of hit points being unrealistic.  A thrown dagger through the eye and into the brain, or through the carotid should kill.  Both should be possible for a level 20 PC on as big a target as a giant.



> A creature's h.p. are part of its xp calculation in my system;




And your system has what exactly to do with 4E's XP calculations?



> and as I've mentioned already the threat does not remain constant when you minionize them.




It increases.  You don't ignore minions and walk past them, safe in the knowledge that they won't hit you.



> Lan-"I have no idea how area-effect damage magic interacts with minions but I'm going to guess it isn't pretty"-efan




No it really isn't.


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## Obryn (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Realistically, the DM should have an interest in the well-being of every NPC out there just like the players care about their PCs.  Most don't bother with this because it's an awful lot of effort trying to come up with motivations, dreams, goals, and life experiences for a bajillion NPCs; but using the example of King Plotdevice I as DM should have a pretty good handle on what makes him tick and am then going to make sure I roleplay to suit what's in his best interest.
> In truth every creature met in the game world is a DMPC of some sort.
> 
> A character in the game world is no less a living, breathing (imaginary) entity just because it doesn't have a player attached.  To think otherwise cheapens the setting and devalues the richness of the game.



Oh goodness, no. They're not. The players have one character each, and are invested in fulfilling their goals, leveling them up, guiding them, ensuring their survival, and getting loot.

The DM has the rest of the world, and just because Terry the Butcher might secretly dream of being a dancer doesn't mean I have anywhere near that level of investment in his survival or well-being as my players have for their PCs. _That's not my job_ as the judge and facilitator of a game where people come over to my house to sit around my table and play D&D.

Giving NPCs depth does not give me, the DM, anywhere near the same level of agency over their well-being or actions as the players deserve over their PCs. Because there's only (say) 5-6 PCs in the whole game, and real people - my players - are sitting around playing them.


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## Der-Rage (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Yes they are.  Hit points are every bit as much a part of a game-world creature's (or PC's) makeup as strength, wisdom, and AC.  They're a part of what you are, their full potential changing as you advance in age/experience/whatever and their actual value changing as you take damage/injury and recover from such.



They're numbers. These numbers do not share a 1:1 correlation with any real substance; to assert that they do not only contradicts common sense, but the actual rules text since D&D was first printed. Numbers that do not represent a concrete thing are abstractions. The Ten Commandments command and prohibit more than ten specific things. The First Amendment of the US constitution has five dependent clauses. We delineate all things abstract into components which we perceive as the main distinct themes and assign those themes numbers, but that doesn't make it any more true that there are only ten commandments in the Hebrew scripture or that the US has only altered its Constitution 27 times.

Hit points are, even within the fiction of the game world, immaterial, numerical values assigned by the game rules to facilitate interaction with the world.  Anything that is abstract is subject to changes in perspective, and the outlook of a first level party is very different than that of a 30th level party. The level one giant Solo fight is not 'in actuality' different than the level 30 minion fight, in as much as a fantasy game can be said to have actuality. The giant hasn't changed. The perspective the players have of the giant changes. They've fought things so much tougher than giants by that point that giants are target practice. It does not offend verisimilitude, it's exactly how our perceptions of the real world work: those math problems that gave you trouble in fourth grade look trivially easy when you're taking Pre-Cal in highschool. The math didn't change; you and your perceptions did.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Whose Line Is It Anyway isn't a game.  It's the name of an improv comedy show.



A _game_ show. The same format is also commonly used by comedy clubs and theater groups. There are plenty of other similar games that revolve around making stuff up surrounding preset prompts of some sort.


> House, I've no idea about.



I'm referring to "playing house"; i.e. the archetypical game that young children engage in where they pretend to be adults and go through (frequently banal) daily activities.


> Sim City is a solo game - and it's balanced the way solo games are, meaning that there is no one dominant strategy.



There are clearly some strategies that are better than others. There's also no real defined victory IIRC; it's simply a question of building whatever you like.

The reason I picked those three is those are all types of games that exist well outside of the D&D world, yet have a lot more in common with D&D than strategy games or wargames. D&D is improvisational theater, it is open-ended exploration of a character, and it is a world simulator. There are many noncompetitive games that share a lot in common with D&D, and few if any of them have any conceit of any type of balance. The Sims. Charades. The list goes on and on.

Of course, many competitive games also aren't balanced between participants/competitors. Take Mafia for example; several defined (and totally unequal) roles create an engaging dynamic.

And even games that do have a concept of competitive balance don't _force_ participants to be equal; they just provide equal opportunity. For example, if I'm dominating the Scrabble scene by getting a Q on a triple word score every time, it doesn't mean that the letter Q is overpowered, it means that I understand the rules better (or have memorized more words that start with Q), which is how you win in Scrabble. If Usain Bolt keeps winning races, that doesn't mean the races are unbalanced, it means he's faster than everyone else. System mastery in D&D (say, picking out optimized Polymorph forms) is essentially similar to skill training for competitive games.



> In terms of overall usefulness yes I believe they ought to be.



What about good ol' basketweaving? Is that supposed to be on the same level as using a sword? Trying to balance apples and oranges is doomed to fail. Even adopting a very limited, restrictive, dungeon-based setting still opens D&D up to a variety of capacities that will never be balanced with each other. A point in performance can't really be compared with a point in a saving throw to the level of rigor that would be required to enforce that level of balance. Likewise, a druid can't really be compared with a rogue to that degree.



> "...If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player-characters. It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals."
> Gary Gygax, _The Strategic Review_



So...if magic is restrained, everything's fine right? I mean, no one anywhere is arguing for unrestrained magic (which to me, sounds synonymous with at-will spells, so maybe someone is).



> You confuse balance with symmetry.  4E is _asymmetric_.  Like e.g. Fox and Geese.  Or any wargame I can think of.  Or any fighting game.  4e is balanced between PCs like a fighting game.  (Who's stronger?  Any good fighting game will have a lot of viable fighters) and between PCs and NPCs like Fox and Geese.  These are both forms of balance.



What you're referring to as asymmetry however, while it may be a perfectly good model for wargames, is not appropriate for a roleplaying game. A roleplaying game is about the characters, not the players, and should be judged in terms of the characters' world and not the players' experience. The players certainly aren't competing with each other (unlike with a wargame), so as  [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] notes, balance between them is irrelevant.


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## Hussar (Jun 30, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> [_NITPICK_]While I agree with your assessment of the long-term playability of Chutes & Ladders due to its randomness, I would have to say it is perfectly balanced- each player has identical odds of any roll or sequence of rolls.[_/NITPICK_]




Oh agreed. It is balanced. Where the analogy breaks down for DnD though is that the DM has six pieces on the board and everyone else has one. Sure other people might win but the DM only has to win once for everyone to lose. 

That's why rocket tag and high level DnD has balance issues.


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## Hussar (Jun 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:
			
		

> The phrase "game balance" may be too general a term.  And in any case, perfect balance is still something unreasonably difficult to achieve - good balance is usually more than good enough.




Totally agree with this.


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## Bluenose (Jun 30, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Yes they are.  Hit points are every bit as much a part of a game-world creature's (or PC's) makeup as strength, wisdom, and AC.  They're a part of what you are, their full potential changing as you advance in age/experience/whatever and their actual value changing as you take damage/injury and recover from such.




And of course changing according to the enemy you're fighting. Unless hit points are absolutely and only meat points, in which case they shouldn't change as a character gains age/experience/whatever, then the opponent's skill level also plays a factor in how hard you find it to defend yourself. The brown belt who finds it easy to defend themselves against novice judoka doesn't survive for long against a master. And if D&D isn't going to increase defences as characters level up and use hit points to represent increased defensive skill, then by far the easiest way to model that aspect of reality is to acknowledge that once skill levels diverge significantly then it makes much more sense to modify hit point totals than to leave them the same.


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## pemerton (Jun 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> The ogre has _a physical form_.  Hit points aren't an inherent part of the game world.



Hit points aren't an inherent part of the gameworld. They can _model_ an inherent property of some element within the gameworld. But they don't have to.

Consider hit points  - or, rather, concussion hits - in Rolemaster, though. In RM a typical 1st level PC has around 100 hits, and falls unconscious if 20 or so are lost. The toughest human warriors tend to max out at around 250 hits, and fall unconscious if 150 or so are lost. There are abilities - both non-magical frenzies and magical/psychic powers - that can change the unconsciousness threshold.

When playing RM, a creature's hits are a measure of a certain aspect of its physique - its ability to withstand pain, bruising and blood loss. Because this doesn't change depending on who the creature is fighting, its number of hits doesn't change depending on who the creature is fighting.

Now consider 4e. In 4e, a creature's hits aren't a measure of any inherent property (physical or magical) of a creature. They measure a relational property of the creature relative to the PCs - roughly speaking, its likelihood of standing against them in combat. Hence it makes perfect sense to change them depending on how powerful the PCs are.

Different RPGs use superficially similar systems for quite different purposes. For me, part of learning to play and GM a game system is learning what purpose(s) its mechanics are meant to serve. Saying that 4e is ridiculous because it doesn't use mechanics for the same purposes that RM does makes no sense to me. There's nothing ridiculous about designing a game to do thing X rather than thing Y.



Lanefan said:


> If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party that same Giant has to have 95 h.p. against a 20th-level party, even though those 95 aren't going to last nearly as long.
> 
> If a Giant (Minion) has 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then that same Giant has to have 1 h.p. against a 3rd-level party, whcih is ridiculous, of course.
> 
> If a Giant (Elite) has 95 h.p. against a 3rd-level party but that same Giant has but 1 h.p. against a 20th-level party then your game-world's mechanical consistency just went out the window; also ridiculous.



The gameworld doesn't have mechanics. The game has mechanics. A gameworld, therefore, doesn't have mechanical consistency. This is a property of a game, not a gameworld

In Rolemaster, the number of concussion hits a creature has tells you something inherent about the creature. Change it, and you change what the description of the creature. If this changes without ingame explanation, the gameworld has become inconsistent.

In 4e, the number of hit points a creature has tells you nothing inherent about the creature. It tells you something about a creature _only when you relate it to the level of the PCs with whom the creature is fighting_. 4e applies these mechanics very consistently, to yield a consistent gameworld.

In Rolemaster, it wouldn't make sense for a giant to have 95 hits against 3rd lvl PCs but 1 hit against 20th level PCs. In 4e this makes perfect sense. Because the games use superficially similar mechanics for really quite different purposes.



Lanefan said:


> Hit points are every bit as much a part of a game-world creature's (or PC's) makeup as strength, wisdom, and AC.  They're a part of what you are



This is utterly system relative. It is true in Rolemaster. It is not true in 4e. I don't think it's true of Gygax's AD&D, either, given that he says expressly that with higher levels hit points (for PCs at least) correlate to the blessings of supernatural forces - and blessings aren't a part of a creature's make up, but rather some external benefit bestowed upon it by an outside force.

As Rolemaster (or RQ, or D&D played with hp as meat) shows, it is possible to have a game in which hits points (or something similar) are part of the makeup of a creature. But that is not a mandatory feature of any game using a mechanic of that sort. (In 4e AC does not correlate to any inherent property of a creature either. AC is in part a function of level, and the level of a creature can be adjusted, in conjunction with its status - minion, standard, elite, solo - to correlate with the level of the PCs it is confronting.)



Lanefan said:


> Gameplay convenience suggests that off-screen things carry their stats with them at all times as they could become on-screen at a second's notice.



That's not my personal experience. I've found, through play experience, that 4e's system of multiple-statted creature versions is more convenient than Rolemaster's system. The convenience manifests itself both in ease of encounter design, and ease of and pleasure in encounter resolution.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Now consider 4e. In 4e, a creature's hits aren't a measure of any inherent property (physical or magical) of a creature. They measure a relational property of the creature relative to the PCs - roughly speaking, its likelihood of standing against them in combat. Hence it makes perfect sense to change them depending on how powerful the PCs are.



Even if we did want to completely dissociate hit points and go down this road, that logic still doesn't hold. If it's a matter of relative judgement, the PC's hp and capacity to deal damage presumably increase with his level, meaning that relative to a static opponent, the ratios shift in his favor as he gains levels. Changing the other half of the ratio is redundant and unnecessary even if you ignore the in-game implications.



> The gameworld doesn't have mechanics. The game has mechanics. A gameworld, therefore, doesn't have mechanical consistency. This is a property of a game, not a gameworld



Both the game and the world have some kind of mechanics. Presumably, the rules in the book represent an overlapping portion of those mechanics, but even if (for some reason) one wants to assert that they don't the world still follows some set of natural laws. Stuff doesn't just happen randomly.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> Both the game and the world have some kind of mechanics. Presumably, the rules in the book represent an overlapping portion of those mechanics, but even if (for some reason) one wants to assert that they don't the world still follows some set of natural laws. Stuff doesn't just happen randomly.




There's no reason to assume that there is any meaningful overlap between the rules under which the world operates, and the rules under which the game operates. If you look at modern-era-set games like from CoC to d20 Modern (uggggh) to Smallville you'll see that few of the rules have any really meaningful crossover with the science reality operates on - many will even oppose it.


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## pemerton (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> Even if we did want to completely dissociate hit points and go down this road, that logic still doesn't hold. If it's a matter of relative judgement, the PC's hp and capacity to deal damage presumably increase with his level, meaning that relative to a static opponent, the ratios shift in his favor as he gains levels. Changing the other half of the ratio is redundant and unnecessary even if you ignore the in-game implications.



I gather from this that you're not familiar with 4e's mechanics (and/or didn't read all of my post).

When you change the hit points of a 4e creature (eg elite to minion) you also change its level, and hence it AC and to hit bonus, and also the damage and other effects of its powers.

The changes are not redundant and unnecessary. They are fundamental to the play of the game, for those who actually are playing it. For instance, it is the 4e treatment of creature level, AC, to hit, hp etc that made it feasible for me to render a hobgoblin army as a series of phalanxes (ie swarms) and thereby run dramatic encounters between the PCs and said army. That can't be done in Rolemaster in any practical fashion, and I know from experience is boring, not dramatic, to resolve in AD&D.



Ahnehnois said:


> Both the game and the world have some kind of mechanics. Presumably, the rules in the book represent an overlapping portion of those mechanics, but even if (for some reason) one wants to assert that they don't the world still follows some set of natural laws. Stuff doesn't just happen randomly.



I assume by "mechanics" of the gameworld you mean the same thing as "natural laws". Of course whether natural laws _cause_ things to happen, or rather are generalisations of what happens, is a vexed question (see eg David Armstrong vs David Hume).

But whatever exactly those natural laws are, I very much doubt they include such rules as "Roll a die", "Change a tally on a record sheet", etc, which is what game mechanics look like. Game mechanics can, perhaps, model such laws (though even Rolemaster and Runequest, the most simulationionst FRPGs I know, don't aspire very strongly to that - they want to simulate processes, not the laws that one would use to characterise those processes), but they can't be identical with such laws.


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## Ahnehnois (Jun 30, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> There's no reason to assume that there is any meaningful overlap between the rules under which the world operates, and the rules under which the game operates. If you look at modern-era-set games like from CoC to d20 Modern (uggggh) to Smallville you'll see that few of the rules have any really meaningful crossover with the science reality operates on - many will even oppose it.



So you're suggesting that people don't know what their maximum Jump distance is or realize that they have roughly a 5% chance of reaching it? They don't recognize that people seem to be categorized in some class-based function based on what they can do? They don't know approximately how high of a fall they can survive before picking up a potentially lethal wound?

It seems common sense to be that most rules create observable in-world consequences that people would understand. Many of them correspond to some aspect of applied gravity, inertia, or other basic principles of physics. Others are necessarily fantastical, but still eminently comprehensible to the character who's experiencing them (for example, I'm sure wizards know how many spell slots they have).

That doesn't mean your character is picturing the d20 rolling in his head. When someone throws a ball at you and you catch it, you can't articulate the calculus equations necessary to predict the ball's motion, but you know where it's going.


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## Umbran (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> Of course, though it has its limitations, not everyone thinks that Chutes and Ladders (or 4e) terrible because they're deriving enjoyment from something other than the exercise of skill to sway the odds in their favor.





You have now shifted from taking potshots at a game, to taking potshots at the players of that game.  Enough.  Take a few days off.

Folks who think we have not had enough of edition warring, take heed.  Enough is enough.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 30, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> So you're suggesting that people don't know what their maximum Jump distance is or realize that they have roughly a 5% chance of reaching it? They don't recognize that people seem to be categorized in some class-based function based on what they can do? They don't know approximately how high of a fall they can survive before picking up a potentially lethal wound?




Given that most people in reality do not know these things in any but the vaguest terms and certainly long-jumping does not even work on a "percentage" basis, sure, I am happy to agree that they probably only have pretty vague ideas on that stuff.


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## billd91 (Jun 30, 2014)

FireLance said:


> So, it fails in just about every aspect of a simulation, and it is more of a fantasy role playing _*game*_ than a rules-as-physics simulation of a world?




I would say that's *exactly* where 4e fails. It lost the balance between game and fantasy/adventure world simulation. And, frankly, I noticed that right away and was convinced the game was the first edition of D&D I didn't want to play.


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## billd91 (Jun 30, 2014)

Obryn said:


> Oh goodness, no. They're not. The players have one character each, and are invested in fulfilling their goals, leveling them up, guiding them, ensuring their survival, and getting loot.
> 
> The DM has the rest of the world, and just because Terry the Butcher might secretly dream of being a dancer doesn't mean I have anywhere near that level of investment in his survival or well-being as my players have for their PCs. _That's not my job_ as the judge and facilitator of a game where people come over to my house to sit around my table and play D&D.
> 
> Giving NPCs depth does not give me, the DM, anywhere near the same level of agency over their well-being or actions as the players deserve over their PCs. Because there's only (say) 5-6 PCs in the whole game, and real people - my players - are sitting around playing them.




I think we're going to have to consider issues like these differences in GMing philosophy. I may not invest as heavily in the well-being of Terry the Butcher as my players invest in their characters in general... but when they encounter him, I *will* be trying to make him as valid and interesting a character as I can and I *will be* invested in his survival. That's my job as a GM - to breathe life into the NPCs as the players do the same with their PCs. It has been my experience that the gaming is much more fun that way. I may play a set of orc raiders differently, but then, none of them are likely to have an ambition of becoming a dancer rather than a butcher. Their motivations are more about personal glory and plunder, even at the risk of grave personal harm.


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## pemerton (Jun 30, 2014)

billd91 said:


> I would say that's *exactly* where 4e fails. It lost the balance between game and fantasy/adventure world simulation.



This is like saying that the failing of AD&D is that it lost an adequate sense of realism.

Gygax, in the introduction to his DMG (p 9), explains that he is not setting out to achieve realism, and this point is reiterated at other places in the game (eg hit point rules, saving throw rules, XP rules, etc). For those who prefer the sort of "realism" that Gygax eschewed, there was Runequest, Chivalry & Sorcery and (not very many years later) Rolemaster. But Gygax didn't lose it - he never had it.

4e doesn't set out to present mechanics for simulating the processes of a fantasy world. It takes for granted that the GM and players can write backstory for such a world without using mechanics. It presents mechanics for resolving player action declarations. It is, in that respect, very close to Gygax's approach with 1 minute rounds and saving throws, and quite a way away from weapon vs armour tables, or 3E's replacement of AD&D saving throws with Fort, Ref and Will. It hasn't _lost_ anything, though, any more than Gygax had - it never set out to achieve it!


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## billd91 (Jun 30, 2014)

pemerton said:


> This is like saying that the failing of AD&D is that it lost an adequate sense of realism.
> 
> Gygax, in the introduction to his DMG (p 9), explains that he is not setting out to achieve realism, and this point is reiterated at other places in the game (eg hit point rules, saving throw rules, XP rules, etc). For those who prefer the sort of "realism" that Gygax eschewed, there was Runequest, Chivalry & Sorcery and (not very many years later) Rolemaster. But Gygax didn't lose it - he never had it.
> 
> 4e doesn't set out to present mechanics for simulating the processes of a fantasy world. It takes for granted that the GM and players can write backstory for such a world without using mechanics. It presents mechanics for resolving player action declarations. It is, in that respect, very close to Gygax's approach with 1 minute rounds and saving throws, and quite a way away from weapon vs armour tables, or 3E's replacement of AD&D saving throws with Fort, Ref and Will. It hasn't _lost_ anything, though, any more than Gygax had - it never set out to achieve it!




You're going to have to accept that I don't see it that way at all. 4e, to me, represented an imbalanced approach to role playing gaming - emphasizing the game play aspects of it to a extreme that had not been present in D&D before.


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## Obryn (Jul 1, 2014)

billd91 said:


> I think we're going to have to consider issues like these differences in GMing philosophy. I may not invest as heavily in the well-being of Terry the Butcher as my players invest in their characters in general... but when they encounter him, I *will* be trying to make him as valid and interesting a character as I can and I *will be* invested in his survival. That's my job as a GM - to breathe life into the NPCs as the players do the same with their PCs. It has been my experience that the gaming is much more fun that way. I may play a set of orc raiders differently, but then, none of them are likely to have an ambition of becoming a dancer rather than a butcher. Their motivations are more about personal glory and plunder, even at the risk of grave personal harm.



The difference, I think, is that if my players use Diplomacy on him to get a better price, I don't feel like my agency over him is being abused. That's over and beyond the fact that I want to make him an interesting character. The practical fact of the matter is that he's onscreen for maybe 15 (hopefully memorable) minutes, and the PCs are there all the time.

No matter how much life I try to put into my NPCs and no matter how much I like them, it's not my job to get attached to them in the same way the players are into their PCs, and they should never approach being as important as the PCs in the world or in the rules.


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

Obryn said:


> The difference, I think, is that if my players use Diplomacy on him to get a better price, I don't feel like my agency over him is being abused.



Whereas I do.

My agency over Terry is already considerably limited in that I don't get to use Diplomacy (or similar) rolls against the PCs; my only recourse for Terry is to try and roleplay my way into or out of whatever situation I or the PCs want to put him in.  For example the PCs can try and Diplomacy their way to a better price for his beef but Terry can't Intimidate them out of his store or Diplomacy them into buying a few cuts of pork to go with said beef.



> That's over and beyond the fact that I want to make him an interesting character. The practical fact of the matter is that he's onscreen for maybe 15 (hopefully memorable) minutes, and the PCs are there all the time.
> 
> No matter how much life I try to put into my NPCs and no matter how much I like them, it's not my job to get attached to them in the same way the players are into their PCs, and they should never approach being as important as the PCs in the world or in the rules.



One of the things that makes a good director a good director is that she pays just as much attention to the details of the show's bit players and extras as she does to the stars.  Same goes here.

Another example: early in my current campaign there was a vaguely-relevant-for-a-while NPC named Madam Merta, owner of a brothel in the realm's biggest city and something of an information gatherer on the side.  She hasn't interacted with a PC for about 3 in-game years; mechanically when last seen she was an intelligent and reasonably charismatic (but not entirely Goodly) commoner who probably had the chops to take up wizardry if she ever had the desire - and the years to spend on training.

If and when a PC ever meets her again I'll roll a few dice and figure out what she's been up to in the intervening time, keeping in mind that the result has to logically follow from what she was before.  In other words, this low-strength person won't have become a 5th-level fighter but might well have become an advisor to or spy for one (or more) of the various interests at work in that city...or she might still just be running her brothel.

While it's not written out on paper anywhere, in my head I've probably got just as much of an idea as to what makes Merta tick as most players do for their PCs; and if I could do this for every NPC they ever met I'd be a much happier DM and I think my game world would be a much deeper and richer setting.  Unfortunately life is too short... 

Lan-"it just shouldn't be possible for someone named Terry the Butcher to have a decent Diplomacy skill"-efan


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I gather from this that you're not familiar with 4e's mechanics (and/or didn't read all of my post).
> 
> When you change the hit points of a 4e creature (eg elite to minion) you also change its level, and hence it AC and to hit bonus, and also the damage and other effects of its powers.



Thus to me making it a completely different creature; and mechanics be damned.

Verbrugge the Frost Giant, sitting on his throne in his glacial hall, has AC -1, 93 h.p., 2 attacks a round at +5 to hit/2d10+8 damage, fights like a 15th-level fighter (or BAB +15, depending on system), cold immunity, and vulnerable to fire.  If he remembered to put it on this morning his crown also gives him an always-on charm effect vs. other Frost Giants; but he's not very bright and thus forgets to wear it about 1 day out of 3.

What you're saying is that most of this changes depending on who or what he's entertaining in his court at any given moment; which to me is preposterous.



> I assume by "mechanics" of the gameworld you mean the same thing as "natural laws". Of course whether natural laws _cause_ things to happen, or rather are generalisations of what happens, is a vexed question (see eg David Armstrong vs David Hume).



The mechanics are essentially a stripped-down expression *of* the game world's natural laws, and at the same time are the interface through which everyone involved - DM and players alike - interact with said world and said laws.  Even if nothing else was involved, this alone would be reason enough to unequivocally state that those mechanics have to be both consistent with themselves and locked in on (or before) first contact in order to ensure both a playable game and believable setting.  A creature whose mechanics change over time dependent on the PCs it's facing is by definition not consistent with itself; which to me renders that mechanical system - or at least that aspect of it - pointless.

Lanefan


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## evileeyore (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> My agency over Terry is already considerably limited in that I don't get to use Diplomacy (or similar) rolls against the PCs...



You don't?  Weird, I do.


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## Henry (Jul 1, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> You don't?  Weird, I do.




Depends on the edition. In 3.x and Pathfinder, the rules explicitly say that Diplomacy can only be used on NPCs (the d20pfsrd does not have the proper rules text on this by the way). No such restriction on bluff and intimidate, mind you, but those are special cases involving uses like fast talking and demoralizing also.


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## Obryn (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> What you're saying is that most of this changes depending on who or what he's entertaining in his court at any given moment; which to me is preposterous.



I will not speak for  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], and he may very well disagree, but for me there's a difference between "*a* frost giant" and "Verbrugge, King of the Frost Giants." The latter carries a whole lot more narrative weight than the former and I'd be inclined, absent any gameplay considerations, to just stat him up as a 19th level or whatever Elite and keep him that way. He's different from a random Frost Giant in the fiction.

With that said, his stats aren't _him_. His fictional role doesn't require any stats until the rubber hits the road. If need be, he could be re-modeled with different stats - for example, if he gets severely wounded (that is, there's an important fictional change), I'd have no qualms about modeling him as a 9th level Solo for a group of 6th-level PCs or something. That'd make for a much more interesting encounter than just leaving him as a 19th level Elite with 20 hit points, and gameplay considerations trump all else in my book.



Lanefan said:


> Whereas I do.
> 
> My agency over Terry is already considerably limited in that I don't get to use Diplomacy (or similar) rolls against the PCs; my only recourse for Terry is to try and roleplay my way into or out of whatever situation I or the PCs want to put him in.  For example the PCs can try and Diplomacy their way to a better price for his beef but Terry can't Intimidate them out of his store or Diplomacy them into buying a few cuts of pork to go with said beef.



You see, to me that's exactly how it _should _work. Mr. the Butcher is an NPC, no matter how many pork chops he summons from his meaty dimension. He doesn't have the same "rights" in gameplay as a PC deserves, and if a die roll says he gets tricked or scared, so be it.


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## evileeyore (Jul 1, 2014)

Henry said:


> Depends on the edition. In 3.x and Pathfinder, the rules explicitly say that Diplomacy can only be used on NPCs (the d20pfsrd does not have the proper rules text on this by the way). No such restriction on bluff and intimidate, mind you, but those are special cases involving uses like fast talking and demoralizing also.



Yup.  And if you feel that removes too much agency from your hands, what do you do?


You fix it.  Or... talk about it online.  Either way, my choice was "fix it", so I decided that rule was stupid, dropped it, and kept on rolling.


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

Obryn said:


> I will not speak for  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], and he may very well disagree, but for me there's a difference between "*a* frost giant" and "Verbrugge, King of the Frost Giants." The latter carries a whole lot more narrative weight than the former and I'd be inclined, absent any gameplay considerations, to just stat him up as a 19th level or whatever Elite and keep him that way. He's different from a random Frost Giant in the fiction.



Sure he's different in that he's a King and people have probably heard of him, but all the same principles should equally apply to the third Frost Giant guard to his right.



> With that said, his stats aren't _him_. His fictional role doesn't require any stats until the rubber hits the road. If need be, he could be re-modeled with different stats - for example, if he gets severely wounded (that is, there's an important fictional change), I'd have no qualms about modeling him as a 9th level Solo for a group of 6th-level PCs or something. That'd make for a much more interesting encounter than just leaving him as a 19th level Elite with 20 hit points, and gameplay considerations trump all else in my book.



Except if he's been statted up as a 19th-level Elite that's what he is, as far as I'm concerned, whether he's raiding a village of commoners or fighting a well-equipped band of 30th-level donkey-kickers.



> You see, to me that's exactly how it _should _work. Mr. the Butcher is an NPC, no matter how many pork chops he summons from his meaty dimension. He doesn't have the same "rights" in gameplay as a PC deserves, and if a die roll says he gets tricked or scared, so be it.



Style difference, then; as from here he should have exactly the same rights (and restrictions) as a PC.

Lan-"is the elemental plane of meat the place where hit points go to die?"-efan


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## Obryn (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Sure he's different in that he's a King and people have probably heard of him, but all the same principles should equally apply to the third Frost Giant guard to his right.
> 
> Except if he's been statted up as a 19th-level Elite that's what he is, as far as I'm concerned, whether he's raiding a village of commoners or fighting a well-equipped band of 30th-level donkey-kickers.
> 
> ...



No, that random frost giant lacks the narrative status. In movie terms, he's a Mook. He doesn't need to stay a Mook forever if the story demands it, but he sure is by default. Major characters carry more weight than minor ones and them more than mooks. And PCs carry more than any of them.

e: The Butcher! (I have a 4 year old.) 
http://wordgirl.wikia.com/wiki/The_Butcher


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

Obryn said:


> No, that random frost giant lacks the narrative status. In movie terms, he's a Mook. He doesn't need to stay a Mook forever if the story demands it, but he sure is by default. Major characters carry more weight than minor ones and them more than mooks. And PCs carry more than any of them.



Storywise you're quite right; any roleplayed interaction is almost certainly going to be with Verbrugge rather than his third-right guard.  However to me they all carry the same weight - the weight of a big friggin' axe, in the guard's case - once the weapons come out.  And it's at this point the guard's already-built-in stats become relevant as well - his h.p., AC, etc. are what they are no matter whether he's fighting a 3rd-level party or a 25th.

Lan-"and I've seen 3rd-level parties dumb enough to try this had the opportunity arisen"-efan


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## Obryn (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Storywise you're quite right; any roleplayed interaction is almost certainly going to be with Verbrugge rather than his third-right guard.  However to me they all carry the same weight - the weight of a big friggin' axe, in the guard's case - once the weapons come out.  And it's at this point the guard's already-built-in stats become relevant as well - his h.p., AC, etc. are what they are no matter whether he's fighting a 3rd-level party or a 25th.
> 
> Lan-"and I've seen 3rd-level parties dumb enough to try this had the opportunity arisen"-efan



For most cases, just using the stats straight out of the monster manual will yield perfectly fine results. However, those aren't the only way to model that guard, and if modeling him as a decent solo for low level parties will be fun and interesting, that's just fine. 

Stats are just a means to an end.


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## Henry (Jul 1, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> Yup.  And if you feel that removes too much agency from your hands, what do you do?
> 
> 
> You fix it.  Or... talk about it online.  Either way, my choice was "fix it", so I decided that rule was stupid, dropped it, and kept on rolling.




Quite right - only in my case, i'd rather the players have the agency to be convinced or not, rather than non-magically mind-controlled, so i'm cool with the rule as is, and in my games intimidate and bluff only applies to demoralize and feinting. If your players are cool with it, rock on.


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## Campbell (Jul 1, 2014)

All abstractions leak. The way I look at it is the combat system in 4e is designed to model physical confrontations of individuals of relatively similar combat potency in similar numbers. I do not view it as a failing of the system that it does not handle facing a larger number of weaker opponents in exactly the same way it models facing a smaller number of stronger opponents. To my mind, minions and solos are tools to model what happens outside the band of what the combat system was designed for. They are exceptions rather than the rule.


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## pemerton (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Thus to me making it a completely different creature
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



What can I say? That's not how 4e works - the creature is first and foremost defined descriptively (eg Verbrugge the Frost Giant King, tougher than all the other frost giants), and the mechanics are a set of game-mechanical tools for presenting Verbrugge in the context of a particular encounter.

Describing a game of that sort as preposterous seems to me like saying that it's prepostorous in Go that black plays first, because in chess white plays first. Or saying that it's preposterous in AD&D that rounds are 1 minute long because in Rolemaster and B/X they're 10 seconds long, in 3e, 4e and 5e they're 6 seconds long, and in HARP they're 2 seconds long.

There's no rule laid up in heaven that says that which colour should move first. There's no rule laid up in heaven that tells us how long a round should be in a fantasy combat resolution system. And there's no rule laid up in heaven that says whether an RPG should use its stats to model inherent properties of the fictional objects, or relational properties of the fictional objects - ie relative to opponents in a given scene. Most RPGs, especially more traditional ones, go the first way; but there are also RPGs that go the second way. (Besides 4e the ones I'm famiiar with include HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling. There are also hints of it in Fate and Marvel Heroic.)



Lanefan said:


> If he remembered to put it on this morning his crown also gives him an always-on charm effect vs. other Frost Giants; but he's not very bright and thus forgets to wear it about 1 day out of 3.



This isn't about resolution at all - it's about description. This is orthgonal to the issue of hit points, level, attack bonus, damage and defences, all of which are about resolution and hence are relative (but not _independently_ relative - they change as a whole in quite systematic ways) relative to the opposition.

But if you're asking "Is it legitimate to model the Black Knight without his armour as a lower-level monster, and then send him up against lower-level PCs than might otherwise face him?" my answer is Yes, absolutely.

I did a version of this with Kas: just woken from a long sleep, and hence considerably weakened, I modelled him as a 13th level elite. Whereas at full strength Kas is an epic-tier threat (ie dangerous to PCs of levels into the 20s).



Lanefan said:


> The mechanics are essentially a stripped-down expression *of* the game world's natural laws



Even in gamies like RM, RQ and Traveller I don't think this is correct. In those systems the mechanics model processes, but not laws.

For instance, assuming that your dice are fair then the mechanics for the games I've mentioned make a whole lot of outcomes fundamentally stochastic. Whereas in the real world they are probably determinate, or if they are metahphysically random the elements of randomness are probably not present where they are in the mechanics.

To give an example from the history of physics: statistical mechanics used to understand the behaviour of gases is an excellent model of processes involving gasses, but it is not any sort of expression - stripped down or otherwise - of the physical laws that govern gases.

The way I generally see the die roll described is as some sort of substitute for all the small elements of an action - positioning, timing, etc - that we don't model in our action declaration, movement rules etc. That's fine as far as it goes, but in the "real" world of the game all those things are determinate, and it is the interaction of those determinate factors of the situation that yields the outcome. "Roll a d20" is not an expression or model of the natural laws that govern those ingame processes. Just as statistical mechanics is not a model of the physical and chemical laws that govern gas molecules; it's a model of the processes that large numbers of gas molecules will undergo under certain (normal) conditions.



Lanefan said:


> at the same time are the interface through which everyone involved - DM and players alike - interact with said world and said laws.  Even if nothing else was involved, this alone would be reason enough to unequivocally state that those mechanics have to be both consistent with themselves and locked in on (or before) first contact in order to ensure both a playable game and believable setting.



With resepct, this is just asseting one particular preference dogmatically, if no other way of playing an RPG were possible.

The 4e mechanics are consistent with themselves - there is nothing inconsistent about saying that a frost giant of constant toughness can be modelled both as a 17th level standard NPC and a 25th level minion, depending on what opposition it is facing, any more than saying that the same person can be to the east of Seattle but to the west of Boston. And they fully support a believable setting (for some fantasy-appropriate notion of "believable"): it's perfectly believable that a frost giant is a tough opponent for knights errant and the like (ie at a roughly Aragorn/Conan power level) but is a weak opponent for demigods and the like (ie at a roughly Gandalf/Hercules power level).

You may not like the mechanical way of realising, in play, those consistent descriptions. That's fine: there's lots of RPG mechanics I'm not really keen on either. But I don't see what it adds to discussion to describe them as "preposterous" or "incoherent", if all you're trying to convey is "different from what I prefer".


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## evileeyore (Jul 1, 2014)

Henry said:


> Quite right - only in my case, i'd rather the players have the agency to be convinced or not, rather than non-magically mind-controlled, so i'm cool with the rule as is, and in my games intimidate and bluff only applies to demoralize and feinting. If your players are cool with it, rock on.



Oh sometimes they aren't.  But I remind them, "Fair is fair".  If they want Diplomacy to be non-magical mind control, then it works both ways (and really 3e Diplomacy can be insanely effective as non-magical mind control with a good enough roll).


Also I run _GURPS_, and the skills in _GURPS_ work slightly differently (but not much).  And I'll be running FATE as my next game and that system actually has Social Combat where losing means you lose.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 1, 2014)

Whenever we have these conversations, I'm most struck by how oddly disconnected our perceptions of "what we're actually doing" are.  At its core, we're playing make-believe.  None of this stuff we're doing is vested with any life except for the life we invest it with.  I'm certain (I hope) that we can all agree on this.  

However, it seems like there always sprouts up these (borderline impossible to get my head around) disagreements about "when" and "how" these things are given life.  I can't see any other answer to the "when" other than when _*they are introduced to the players, during play*_.  They don't exist in some state of quantum superposition until that happens.  This is make-believe.  They flat out don't exist until they are introduced to the players, during play.  Just because the GM may have some concrete, or even vague, conception of these make believe people and make believe places before they are introduced to the players (during play) means nothing.  They don't exist to the players.  And they can't exist such that they are "living, breathing" things to the players' characters until they are established in play.

This seems so absolutely fundamental to me but I believe there is, nuanced or not, disagreement on this simple premise.  I try to wrap my head around what could lead to this disagreement and it seems that it may stem from an idea that I cannot, no matter how I might try, get on board with; that the "when" occurs when_* the GM conceives it*_.  The undiscovered places and NPCs, either in the GM's head or written down on scratch paper or in a notebook, actually transcend their nothingness and enter into this state of quantum superposition.  They now officially "exist" regardless of their pending status of actually being introduced in play.  And so its important that they "have life breathed into them at this point."  And that means mechanical iteration.

So...I guess...if you as a player or as a GM hold to this premise, it then becomes paramount that the GM must have each and every thing existing (that may potentially be introduced in play) mechanically fleshed out using some kind of universal "this is the stuff things are made of and these are the processes they are governed by" build mechanics...otherwise...the make-believe stuff that hasn't been established in play to the players (and may very well never be) can't possibly be "real" or "legitimate"...even outside of play.  

I wonder if there is overlap between folks who have internalized that premise and the folks who feel that Gods shouldn't be mechanically iterated because they should narrative relevance only, and the moment you invest them with mechanical architecture to facilitate their place in (violent) conflict resolution, their narrative relevance is subordinated to their "target of murderhobo orthodoxy" status.  Minion/Mook rules follow similar logic, only working a bit orthogonally.  They become such "deltas", relative to the PCs' high status, that their mechanical architecture needs to support that prescribed relevance within the (violent) conflict resolution mechanics, lest they cease to perpetuate their intended genre/narrative/game agenda interests.


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## pemerton (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> My agency over Terry is already considerably limited in that I don't get to use Diplomacy (or similar) rolls against the PCs; my only recourse for Terry is to try and roleplay my way into or out of whatever situation I or the PCs want to put him in.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> One of the things that makes a good director a good director is that she pays just as much attention to the details of the show's bit players and extras as she does to the stars.  Same goes here.



I find comparisons between playing a character in an RPG and playing or directing a character in a movie can be awkward, because a movie is typically already scripted, or at least plotted, whereas I prefer that an RPG not be.

No actor in a movie has the type of agency - ie full powers of authorship - that I want players in an RPG to enjoy.

As a GM, my agency operates in respect of background, scene-framing and adjudication of action resolution. And my control of NPCs is in pursuit of each of those things. Although in some ways the output is the same - there is a character who says and does stuff - the rationale behind that output, and the means whereby it is generated, is very different, at least for me.

To make this a bit more concrete: a player generally knows what his/her PC wants, and in play is pursuing that goal. As GM I may or may not know what an NPC wants - that can vary quite a bit - but in play I am not trying to bring it about that the NPC gets what s/he wants. That information about the NPC is a piece of backstory that can play a role in scene-framing or action resolution. But it is not a reason for me to adjudicate action resolution one way rather than another; and I might frame a scene with the idea that it will show up the futility of the NPC's desire just as much as framing a scene in which the NPC might achieve his/her desire. Whereas it would be very unusual for a player to declare an action with the aim of having his/her PC thwarted in his/her goals.


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## pemerton (Jul 1, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> None of this stuff we're doing is vested with any life except for the life we invest it with.  I'm certain (I hope) that we can all agree on this.
> 
> However, it seems like there always sprouts up these (borderline impossible to get my head around) disagreements about "when" and "how" these things are given life.  I can't see any other answer to the "when" other than when _*they are introduced to the players, during play*_.
> 
> ...



I think you are right to identify the contrasting views, but I'm not sure you've hit on some of the reasons. (At least, not in this post. I think you yourself are aware of them.)

If you look at my recent Lewis Pulsipher thread, you can see a very good gameplay reason why, for a certain playstyle, game elements need to have at least some mechanical realisation in advance of being encountered by the PCs: because in gamist exploration play, part of the challenge for the players is to use information-gathering techniuqes (eg detection spells) to work out what is where, and how tough it is, in order to maximise their ability to exploit (via their PCs) the ingame situation.

A different instance of the same phenomenon is found in Gygax's pursuit rules in his DMG, which - in stating the algorithm for determining whether or not monsters pursue fleeing PCs - gives as the first step "The monsters will act as the DM has noted in his/her dungeon key". This fact about the gameworld was set in advance, when the GM wrote up the dungeon, and was a potential object of inquiry for the players (eg via ESP, Commune etc).

Flexible backstory, of the sort I use, is anathema to this Gygaxian/Pulsipherian style of play, because flexible backstory keeps the pressure on the PCs, and hence the players, regardless of the choices they make! (Of course, those choices change the fictional content of the pressure.) Which is great for thematic play, but tantamount to cheating in gamist exploration play.

But of course this Gygaxian/Pulsipherian technique isn't about establishing a "living, breathing world". It's about posing a certain sort of challenge.

I'm not sure when the move to "living, breathing world" happened. I'm guessing it became widespread in the early to mid 80s. To me, it seems like a case of continuing to follow practical advice given by Gygax, Moldvay etc (eg write stuff up and record it in the GM's notes) but changing the rationale - it's no longer to support gamist exploration play, but rather for some other purpose. What I personally don't have a great handle on is what that other purpose is: it's to do with a certain sort of immersionist verisimilitue (including, perhaps, for the GM in the course of actua play!), but I'm probably not the best person to describe it.


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## Nagol (Jul 1, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> Whenever we have these conversations, I'm most struck by how oddly disconnected our perceptions of "what we're actually doing" are.  At its core, we're playing make-believe.  None of this stuff we're doing is vested with any life except for the life we invest it with.  I'm certain (I hope) that we can all agree on this.
> 
> However, it seems like there always sprouts up these (borderline impossible to get my head around) disagreements about "when" and "how" these things are given life.  I can't see any other answer to the "when" other than when _*they are introduced to the players, during play*_.  They don't exist in some state of quantum superposition until that happens.  This is make-believe.  They flat out don't exist until they are introduced to the players, during play.  Just because the GM may have some concrete, or even vague, conception of these make believe people and make believe places before they are introduced to the players (during play) means nothing.  They don't exist to the players.  And they can't exist such that they are "living, breathing" things to the players' characters until they are established in play.
> 
> ...




I use a mid-point.  Items become concrete when they begin to inform the campaign -- the players may not have been introduced to the creature/item but its form and nature starts to become less amorphous once its nature affects the world in ways the PCs can notice.  The players may not be introduced to it until much later, depending on player interest, observation, and luck.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jul 1, 2014)

I want some thoughts on this:

I ran a 4e game where I made up these creatures that were basically super zombies from an aberrant realm. They were partially made of a dark purple crystal that made them very powerful.

At level 1 my PCs saw and ran from 1 that was a level 6 Solo Skimisher... they called him "The dark Musketeer" (long story there, not important)
 by level 3 they fought him once and saw a second one... but they got lucky and the environment let them escape 

at level 4 they killed the Dark musketeer and found 3 of these things and ran...

at level 7 they fought the 3 they saw... but they were not level 6 solo's they were level 10 elites... they killed 2 and the third ran off.

at level 11 they saw an army of 200 of these things come through a rift. They were scared. They did also recive a special blessing just about that time by the gods or both magic and death... (it allowed them to upgrade there weapons to +4 weapons) When the wave was coming toward the settlement they wanted to protect, they thought it was game over... but they went out there to buy time. The even made eachother  promise they would burn each others bodies so they could not come back as purple crystal zombies... I had them stated as level 16 minons... 

see the point is in game they were all the same basic creature, heck the 1 of the 3 that ran was with the hoard... but out of game the stats changed with the game...


now, if I never told you stats, but you played in the game where 1 guy fought all 6 players, then 3 of them showed up, and you beat them bearly... then 200 showed up and you slaughtered them... would that ruin your image of the game or would you tell the brave story?


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## Manbearcat (Jul 1, 2014)

pemerton said:


> game elements need to have at least some mechanical realisation in advance of being encountered by the PCs: because in gamist exploration play, part of the challenge for the players is to use information-gathering techniuqes (eg detection spells) to work out what is where, and how tough it is, in order to maximise their ability to exploit (via their PCs) the ingame situation.




Yup.  Absolutely.  And as you note below:



pemerton said:


> But of course this Gygaxian/Pulsipherian technique isn't about establishing a "living, breathing world". It's about posing a certain sort of challenge.




When I run a gamist dungeon crawl or a wilderness excursion through a haunted forest (etc) with a home base village/town/city to resupply/rest/sell, "living, breathing world" isn't what I'm after.  There will be enough pomp and circumstance in my presentation of the people and places that folks will be entertained, but little more than that.  What needs to be established pre-play are the challenge components (that you mention and Pulsipher/Gygax mention) as the challenge is the entire point of play.

What we're running up against here (as you know and I'm sure everyone else does), is a different beast of an agenda entirely.



pemerton said:


> I'm not sure when the move to "living, breathing world" happened. I'm guessing it became widespread in the early to mid 80s. To me, it seems like a case of continuing to follow practical advice given by Gygax, Moldvay etc (eg write stuff up and record it in the GM's notes) but changing the rationale - it's no longer to support gamist exploration play, but rather for some other purpose. What I personally don't have a great handle on is what that other purpose is: it's to do with a certain sort of immersionist verisimilitue (including, perhaps, for the GM in the course of actua play!), but I'm probably not the best person to describe it.




My original introduction to D&D was of the Gygaxian and Pulsipherian variety.  This occurred in 1984.  I ran D&D games like that for several years until I ran into a group of folks that told me I was doing it wrong.  That was around 92,  right around the time of CoC 5e, VtM, and a few years after AD&D 2e.  They mostly enjoyed the former two but played the latter as well.  I learned the (illusionism) techniques and GMing principles required to run games for them to their taste but I never enjoyed it (ok, I hated it...I could do it well but it wasn't fun).  Later I ran D&D games with folks looking for the sort of "Kick in the Door" (but not up to the task compared to old school D&D) and "The Right to Dream" sandboxing fusion that 3e D&D aimed at delivering (at least according to its DMG).

I want to say the "living, breathing world" stuff as the centerpiece for play was the 92 group.  The "illusionism" definitely was.  I played and ran Classic Traveller alongside 1e in those 84ish years.  I never played GURPS, but it was released in 86ish.  My guess is that a lot of the culture of the "living, breathing world made manifest only through ardent process sim" spawned from GURPS while CoC, VtM, and AD&D 2e ushered in the "illusionism" culture.  I think 3e's culture, system, and GMing principles was spawned from the synthesis of the prior two with a(n incoherent) nod toward classic Gygaxian/Pulsipherian play (that didn't really pass muster).


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## billd91 (Jul 1, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> now, if I never told you stats, but you played in the game where 1 guy fought all 6 players, then 3 of them showed up, and you beat them bearly... then 200 showed up and you slaughtered them... would that ruin your image of the game or would you tell the brave story?




I would probably find it disruptive. From a metagame perspective, knowing the minion rules, I would figure it out. But I'd be kind of disappointed as well that the DM decided to put the ball on the T rather than throw some heat across the plate. Haven't I shown I can hit his pitches by beating these monsters before? Throwing 200 of them at us but nerfing them as minions when they've been a tough challenge before would end up being pretty unsatisfying - about as bad as being thrown in an impossible situation and then having our win fudged out of it because the DM had a particular story to tell and we were his vehicle for doing so.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 1, 2014)

Nagol said:


> I use a mid-point.  Items become concrete when they begin to inform the campaign -- the players may not have been introduced to the creature/item but its form and nature starts to become less amorphous once its nature affects the world in ways the PCs can notice.  The players may not be introduced to it until much later, depending on player interest, observation, and luck.




For instance, perhaps you're referring to a revelation or an omen of ill portent where the resolution of "It" is low at its inception.  "It" does something concrete that perturbs the world, interfacing with the PCs in some way (either peripherally or directly).  The PCs do not proactively involve themselves with whatever conflict "it" is pushing.  "It" does more concrete things and therefore its malleability recedes until "It" is made wholly rigid due to either (i) a requisite number of concrete things "It" has done (which establishes its nature) or (ii) "It" gets up close and personal with the PCs because they seek "It" out.  When it appears inevitable that it will reach (i) or (ii), "It" is mechanically iterated.

I'm pretty sure I understand what you're describing, but, if you wouldn't mind, could you provide an example from your table?


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## Hussar (Jul 1, 2014)

Mathematicians and physicists have a similar problem in that physicists try to reify abstractions.  Math can state that X and Y are both true.  But that doesn't mean that whatever X and Y are actually exists in the real world.  Unfortunately, there are a number of times when physicists insist that because the math is true, therefore something must exist.

We see the same issue in RPG's.  The mechanics are abstractions.  They aren't real.  At best, they're a convenient shorthand for modelling the resolution of an action, but, they are never that action itself.  Let's go back to hit points for a second.  While we disagree what HP are, I think we can all agree that HP measure how hard it is to kill something.  But, that's just an abstraction.  We don't have to use HP to measure that and many games don't.  

If we reify HP, then the question has to be asked, what is a HP?  The thing is, because it's an abstraction, what a HP actually is is whatever it needs to be at the moment.  The idea of large numbers of HP means that the character can turn a serious blow to a minor one.  At least, that's one interpretation.  But, then, why does a dinosaur have 36 HD and 120 HP? It's not turning serious blows.  It's not dodging.  But, it does make sense to have buckets of HP.  Trying to kill something that's the size of a bus with your lumpy metal thing plus 1 is going to take a while.  (See the excellent short story, A Gun for Dinosaur for an excellent way to handle this)

OTOH, you have small creatures with buckets of HP.  A halfling barbarian can have the same HP as that dinosaur.  So, obviously, the halfling is doing lots of dodging.  Because it's pretty obvious that my 3 foot tall halfling isn't going to take a while lot of punishment, he's just not big enough.

And that's where the reification of the abstraction breaks down.  What is a HP?  Well, a HP is whatever we need it to be depending on who's being hit, and who's doing the hitting.  The idea that we have to have any sort of direct correlation between the abstraction and the effect that's being modelled breaks down under even a cursory examination.  Gygax realised that back in the 70's and commented on it in the DMG.  

So, when people try claiming that 4e is somehow very different, it begs the question, how is it different?  The game has never actually supported the idea that there is a direct correlation between mechanics and what actually happens in the game.  Trying to do so means that you really, really have to put some big blinders on and ignore all sorts of things.  Which leads to all sorts of frustration when trying to discuss this.  Bill91 talks about how 4e was so different that what came before.  But, when you start talking specifics, all the examples fall apart.  At least when it comes to the sim approach taken by gamers.

I can totally see hating AEDU.  That's fine.  It's a very different play thing that hasn't been seen before in D&D.  But AEDU, or minions, or fast healing, isn't a sim issue.  That's not the problem here.  Because sim has never, ever been part of D&D.  It's only been since the release of 4e that I ever even heard anyone seriously talk about D&D as a sim game.  Any sim based player I ever talked to would laugh themselves silly if someone seriously tried to point to D&D (any edition) as a sim game.  There's a REASON GURPS and other games exist.  It's because people who actually wanted to play sim games wouldn't touch D&D.

I really see this as people trying to justify their dislike in some sort of concrete terms instead of just saying, "I don't like it."  You don't need a because.  Honest you don't.  You don't have to justify why you don't like it in terms of how it isn't playing up to some play style that the game has never, ever actually supported.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jul 1, 2014)

billd91 said:


> I would probably find it disruptive. From a metagame perspective, knowing the minion rules, I would figure it out. But I'd be kind of disappointed as well that the DM decided to put the ball on the T rather than throw some heat across the plate. Haven't I shown I can hit his pitches by beating these monsters before? Throwing 200 of them at us but nerfing them as minions when they've been a tough challenge before would end up being pretty unsatisfying - about as bad as being thrown in an impossible situation and then having our win fudged out of it because the DM had a particular story to tell and we were his vehicle for doing so.




The ironey here is that 25 level 6 solos are easier to fight but more annoying (just big bag oh hp) well 16th level minons where way harder to fight (and much better at making the fight intresting)

The minons may only have 1 hp but they have +10 to Ac and attacks over that solo


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Mathematicians and physicists have a similar problem in that physicists try to reify abstractions.  Math can state that X and Y are both true.  But that doesn't mean that whatever X and Y are actually exists in the real world.  Unfortunately, there are a number of times when physicists insist that because the math is true, therefore something must exist.




Well...there's a really good reason for that: if the physicists' math says that something exists and they don't find it, then some element of the model they're using is simply wrong.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 1, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> now, if I never told you stats, but you played in the game where 1 guy fought all 6 players, then 3 of them showed up, and you beat them bearly... then 200 showed up and you slaughtered them... would that ruin your image of the game or would you tell the brave story?




When I watch an episode of Justice League where the entire League nearly gets their butts handed to them by a handful of Manhunters at the beginning, and an hour later are ripping through six of them with one attack - I find it compromises my suspense of disbelief.  So I suspect I'd feel the same way about your scenario.

Some people like those rules and some don't.  I don't think one is objectively better - but I think it's pretty clear from these debates that neither group gets over that "seems wrong to me" feeling easily.


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## pemerton (Jul 1, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> At level 1 my PCs saw and ran from 1 that was a level 6 Solo Skimisher... they called him "The dark Musketeer" (long story there, not important)
> by level 3 they fought him once and saw a second one... but they got lucky and the environment let them escape
> 
> at level 4 they killed the Dark musketeer and found 3 of these things and ran...
> ...



That's a good example of what I was talking about.

In my own game I've never done the full solo to minion transition, but with hobgoblins I've done standard > minion > swarm, as the PCs levelled and took on more and more of the hobgoblin army at once.



Savage Wombat said:


> When I watch an episode of Justice League where the entire League nearly gets their butts handed to them by a handful of Manhunters at the beginning, and an hour later are ripping through six of them with one attack - I find it compromises my suspense of disbelief.  So I suspect I'd feel the same way about your scenario.



You don't think it's relevant that in the example, the PCs have risen from 1st to 11th level?

In terms of the actual fiction, 5e is meant to play out in much the same way - 1st level PCs will have trouble with individual creatures whereas at 11th level they'll be cutting through the same creature like butter. It's just that bounded accuracy is an alternative mechanical framework from the 4e one, of simultaneously tweaking role and level.



billd91 said:


> I would probably find it disruptive. From a metagame perspective, knowing the minion rules, I would figure it out. But I'd be kind of disappointed as well that the DM decided to put the ball on the T rather than throw some heat across the plate. Haven't I shown I can hit his pitches by beating these monsters before? Throwing 200 of them at us but nerfing them as minions when they've been a tough challenge before would end up being pretty unsatisfying



I don't get this, for the same reason as the poster you're replying to.

Here are the base stats for a 16th level minion and an 8th level standard (which are XP equivalents):


```
Level:      8 standard     16 minion

Hp:          90-ish                1 (but immune to damage on a miss)

AC:         22                    30
F/R/W:      20                    28 

To hit:     +13                  +21

Damage:    16                    12
```

At 11th level, the PCs will have to hit bonuses vs AC of around +16, and AC of around 25.

So the typical minion will take around 3 attacks to drop (roll needed of 14+), and will hit .85 of the time, for expected total damage output of a smidgeon more than 29 hp.

The typical standard will take around 4 attacks to drop (roll needed of 6+, and there will be AoEs and dailies dealing damage on a miss!).  It will hit a bit less than half the time (roll needed of 12+) for expected total damage output of a smidgeon less than 29 hp.

In other words, framing the combat in terms of higher level minions rather than lower level standards is not "putting the ball on the T". It is choosing a mechanical framing that will make the game run more smoothly - in this particular instance, it saves the GM having to track hit point totals on 200 creatures, by shifting their defensive heft from hit points to AC and F/R/W - and in the process also shifts their offensive heft from the damage number to the attack bonus.


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## Bluenose (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Storywise you're quite right; any roleplayed interaction is almost certainly going to be with Verbrugge rather than his third-right guard.  However to me they all carry the same weight - the weight of a big friggin' axe, in the guard's case - once the weapons come out.  And it's at this point the guard's already-built-in stats become relevant as well - his h.p., AC, etc. are what they are no matter whether he's fighting a 3rd-level party or a 25th.
> 
> Lan-"and I've seen 3rd-level parties dumb enough to try this had the opportunity arisen"-efan




So a 25th level Fighter is no better at placing blows to bypass the opponents defences than a 3rd level one. They can't possibly land blows from directions the frost giant can't predict and avoid and which land in critical places so the giant is put out of the fight by one blow.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 1, 2014)

Ahnehnois said:


> A _game_ show.




Nope.  An improvised comedy show loosely based around the format of a game show.



> There are many noncompetitive games that share a lot in common with D&D,




You assume that D&D is non-competitive.  This is not always the case and it _certainly_ isn't how D&D was designed.



> Of course, many competitive games also aren't balanced between participants/competitors. Take Mafia for example; several defined (and totally unequal) roles create an engaging dynamic.




Mafia has defined roles and asymmetric balance.  Sounds a lot like 4E...



> What about good ol' basketweaving? Is that supposed to be on the same level as using a sword?




Nope.  Use of a sword is a core ability.

On the other hand basketweaving fails as a skill because it's supposed to be on the same level as _move silently_ or _use magic device_.



> So...if  magic is restrained, everything's fine right? I mean, no one anywhere  is arguing for unrestrained magic (which to me, sounds synonymous with  at-will spells, so maybe someone is).




Do you have any idea how restrained Gygax made magic and his wizards?



> What you're referring to as asymmetry however, while it may be a  perfectly good model for wargames, is not appropriate for a roleplaying  game. A roleplaying game is about the characters, not the players, and  should be judged in terms of the characters' world and not the players'  experience. The players certainly aren't competing with each  other




Right.  You've just declared oD&D and Paranoia to not be RPGs.



billd91 said:


> You're going to have to accept that I don't see  it that way at all. 4e, to me, represented an imbalanced approach to  role playing gaming - emphasizing the game play aspects of it to a  extreme that had not been present in D&D before.




I don't care how you see it.

When we are producing statements  from Gary Gygax that are explicitly in favour of the "imbalance" you  talk about then your statement that it had not been present in D&D  before is quite clearly false.  If you want to say that "4E represents a  return to the gamist roots of D&D and we moved away from them for a  reason" feel free. But saying that the roots weren't there is a  reflection on you not on the game.



evileeyore said:


> Yup.  And if you feel that removes too much agency from your hands, what do you do?




Ah, the travails of the DM.  Never as powerful as they want to be _despite the fact they control almost all the world_.  People talk about "Entitled players".  I've never met one, despite  spending more time in the DM's chair than as a player.  I've met a lot  of entitled DMs.



evileeyore said:


> Oh sometimes they aren't.  But I remind them,  "Fair is fair".  If they want Diplomacy to be non-magical mind control,  then it works both ways (and really 3e Diplomacy can be insanely  effective as non-magical mind control with a good enough roll).




In short you houserule something that isn't broken.  Because as DM you want more power.



> And I'll be running FATE as my next game and that system actually has Social Combat where losing means you lose.




And has a system to do with controlling how you give in.



pemerton said:


> But of course this Gygaxian/Pulsipherian  technique isn't about establishing a "living, breathing world". It's  about posing a certain sort of challenge.
> 
> I'm not sure when the move to "living, breathing world" happened. I'm  guessing it became widespread in the early to mid 80s.




I'd  have said so too.  I'd also have said that one of the things that set  D&D apart from later RPGs is that it doesn't do this.  It's set up  to be what it is.



billd91 said:


> I would probably find it disruptive. From a  metagame perspective, knowing the minion rules, I would figure it out.  But I'd be kind of disappointed as well that the DM decided to put the  ball on the T rather than throw some heat across the plate. Haven't I  shown I can hit his pitches by beating these monsters before? Throwing  200 of them at us but nerfing them as minions when they've been a tough  challenge before would end up being pretty unsatisfying




200  minions would be more of a challenge than 200 monsters that only hit on  a natural 20.  And this is what you continually miss.  When you  minionise something _it gets +8 to hit and +8 to defences_ and is _almost exactly_ as much of a threat as it was before.



Savage Wombat said:


> When I watch an episode of Justice League  where the entire League nearly gets their butts handed to them by a  handful of Manhunters at the beginning, and an hour later are ripping  through six of them with one attack - I find it compromises my suspense  of disbelief.  So I suspect I'd feel the same way about your scenario.




And  this is where your analogy falls apart.  You are equating a dozen  levels to a single episode.  Now I don't know how fast your PCs level in  your games.  But a dozen levels is several _series_ in mine.   Just because Buffy herself has problems even with newborn minion  vampires at the start of Season 1 doesn't mean that Willow and Xander  can't take them out without too much trouble in Season 5.  I'd object if  it happened across the course of one episode, but not if it does across  multiple series.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jul 1, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> When I watch an episode of Justice League where the entire League nearly gets their butts handed to them by a handful of Manhunters at the beginning, and an hour later are ripping through six of them with one attack - I find it compromises my suspense of disbelief.  So I suspect I'd feel the same way about your scenario.
> 
> Some people like those rules and some don't.  I don't think one is objectively better - but I think it's pretty clear from these debates that neither group gets over that "seems wrong to me" feeling easily.




ok, but what about when you sit down to watch a 5 season run of Justice league, and the end bad guy of season 1 is a Manhunter, and half way through season 3 they fight three man hunters... and the season 4 finaly is 200 manhunters, and right before the fight there is an obvious up grade in powers (superman sun dips,Green lantern becomes Ion, ect) because that is much closer to my example...

Most people I know would consider it awesome that we showed how there characters grew... how the biggest most powerful threat they saw at level 1, something they had to run from...became later just part of the army they slaughtered... by the way the leader of the Army was "Kingdom" and he was a level 21 solo+ (my own design with 3 full initative counts, hp over level, and interrupts and reactions for each set of actions)



pemerton said:


> That's a good example of what I was talking about.
> 
> In my own game I've never done the full solo to minion transition, but with hobgoblins I've done standard > minion > swarm, as the PCs levelled and took on more and more of the hobgoblin army at once.



 well I skiped standard in the equation, but it was a lot of fun to do it that way.



> I don't get this, for the same reason as the poster you're replying to.
> 
> Here are the base stats for a 16th level minion and an 8th level standard (which are XP equivalents):
> 
> ...




thank you for posting this... once again by increasing level and decreasing secondary type (solo elite minon) you creat MORE INTRESTING AND HARDER fights... not putting anything on a T




> In other words, framing the combat in terms of higher level minions rather than lower level standards is not "putting the ball on the T". It is choosing a mechanical framing that will make the game run more smoothly - in this particular instance, it saves the GM having to track hit point totals on 200 creatures, by shifting their defensive heft from hit points to AC and F/R/W - and in the process also shifts their offensive heft from the damage number to the attack bonus.



could not say it better myself...


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## Sadras (Jul 1, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Flexible backstory, of the sort I use, is anathema to this Gygaxian/Pulsipherian style of play, because flexible backstory keeps the pressure on the PCs, and hence the players, regardless of the choices they make! (Of course, those choices change the fictional content of the pressure.) Which is great for thematic play, but tantamount to cheating in gamist exploration play.




Flexible backstory? Are we saying players can change their characters backgrounds every x period of time or when they fee like it? Or is it flexible due to the allowance of increasing character backstory content?



> I'm not sure when the move to "living, breathing world" happened. I'm guessing it became widespread in the early to mid 80s. To me, it seems like a case of continuing to follow practical advice given by Gygax, Moldvay etc (eg write stuff up and record it in the GM's notes) but changing the rationale - it's no longer to support gamist exploration play, but rather for some other purpose. What I personally don't have a great handle on is what that other purpose is: it's to do with a certain sort of immersionist verisimilitue (including, perhaps, for the GM in the course of actua play!), but I'm probably not the best person to describe it.




I will make an attempt although I speak with no real authority on the matter. Perhaps 'living, breathing world' allows for players to make more informed decisions, based primarily on their previous experiences and knowledge.
The characters are much more imbedded into the setting - with the deities laws, dangerous locales, belief of superstitions...etc  

In the absence of 'living, breathing world' everything is possible at the get go since one is continuously running level-based combat challengers which is, one could argue, but an exercise in die rolling. Sure there is the illusion of meaningful choices being made, which ability to use first in combination with which allies' abilities, how to use terrain..etc  and the consequences are the same, worst case scenario one's character dies BUT one knows that EVERY challenge is based on their level and it doesn't have to be intuitive with the world at all.

How would you discourage players deciding that their 1st level characters from crossing the Altan Peaks (dangerous group of mountains for 1st levels in Mystara)? I mean they already know every encounter is based on level not on an intuitive world, so the dragons they will encounter will be of a comparable level as will the giants?  



Hussar said:


> I can totally see hating AEDU.  That's fine.  It's a very different play thing that hasn't been seen before in D&D.  But AEDU, or minions, or fast healing, isn't a sim issue.  That's not the problem here.  Because sim has never, ever been part of D&D.  It's only been since the release of 4e that I ever even heard anyone seriously talk about D&D as a sim game.  Any sim based player I ever talked to would laugh themselves silly if someone seriously tried to point to D&D (any edition) as a sim game.  There's a REASON GURPS and other games exist.  It's because people who actually wanted to play sim games wouldn't touch D&D.




Yes and no, D&Ders have been making house-rules for the sim-approach for years. Wounds, Fatigue, DR, Recovery rates...etc just to name a few. Even 4e has it's inherent bonus - trying to emulate a setting which I dare say lends towards a sim-approach.  



Neonchameleon said:


> Ah, the travails of the DM.  Never as powerful as they want to be _despite the fact they control almost all the world_.  People talk about "Entitled players".  I've never met one, despite  spending more time in the DM's chair than as a player.  I've met a lot  of entitled DMs.




The way I see it sports continues to evolve, adding more regulations and limitations not so much for the refs but for the abusive players. D&D isn't the exception, where humans just become these amazingly creatures, this gene must be isolated to rpgers  
There is the option of arguing the monetary incentive involved in sports...but are you going to go that route?  



> In short you houserule something that isn't broken.  Because as DM you want more power.




What is and isn't broken is dependent on the group, but non-magical charm (diplomacy) is not an isolated incident.


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## Hussar (Jul 1, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Well...there's a really good reason for that: if the physicists' math says that something exists and they don't find it, then some element of the model they're using is simply wrong.




This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right?  It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 1, 2014)

Sadras said:


> Flexible backstory? Are we saying players can  change their characters backgrounds every x period of time or when they  fee like it? Or is it flexible due to the allowance of increasing  character backstory content?




If I've understood  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s meaning, the clearest cut example of Flexible Backstory is  Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World.  In it the GM is instructed to prepare  _absolutely nothing_ before character creation.  How the world actually works is revealed to _both_ the GM and the players in the course of play.

And  Apocalypse World and its spinoff Monsterhearts are the two most  immersive RPGs I know, with in play the two most immediate worlds and  with the characters being embedded in the setting in a way that no  pre-existing world can match.



> How would you discourage players deciding that their 1st  level characters from crossing the Altan Peaks (dangerous group of  mountains for 1st levels in Mystara)? I mean they already know every  encounter is based on level not on an intuitive world, so the dragons  they will encounter will be of a comparable level as will the giants?




This is a strawman.  If you want higher level areas have higher level areas.



> Yes and no, D&Ders have been making house-rules for the  sim-approach for years. Wounds, Fatigue, DR, Recovery rates...etc just  to name a few. Even 4e has it's inherent bonus - trying to emulate a  setting which I dare say lends towards a sim-approach.




 4E is in my opinion the best fantasy sim edition of D&D ever.



> The way I see it sports continues to evolve, adding more  regulations and limitations not so much for the refs but for the abusive  players. D&D isn't the exception, where humans just become these  amazingly creatures, this gene must be isolated to rpgers




If  the ref started kicking the ball around they wouldn't just be a  referee.  They'd be a player as well.  The second the DM picks up the  dice they cease to be an entirely disinterested referee. This is a bug  in some styles of game (really old school dungeon crawling) and a  feature in others (White Wolf calling the GM the Storyteller) - but in  all it is a fact of life.  There is far more scope for a player who can  send other players off to be abusive than there is for one who can't.



> What  is and isn't broken is dependent on the group, but non-magical charm  (diplomacy) is not an isolated incident.




Neither is the DMPC. Nor the Monty Haul DM.  Nor the Railroading  Storyteller.  Nor the DM's Girlfriend.  Also using diplomacy is a matter  of using the rules as they were designed.  That's a game design issue.


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## evileeyore (Jul 1, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Ah, the travails of the DM.  Never as powerful as they want to be _despite the fact they control almost all the world_.  People talk about "Entitled players".  I've never met one, despite  spending more time in the DM's chair than as a player.  I've met a lot  of entitled DMs.



So have I.  I don't play with them for long.

Oh, were you making some sort of insult towards me?   Heh.




> In short you houserule something that isn't broken.  Because as DM you want more power.



It was that or let someone else run and deal with two problem players.  You know the type:  They say they're going along with the mission, but they decide half-way to the "mission area" they need to do something else, derail everything, run around in circles, or just be obstinate?

Luckily for me one of them was very "By The Books" and was surprisingly okay with being coerced via Diplomacy/Bluff/whatever checks into deciding to "go along with what the NPC was asking the group to do".  Hence the ruling.

The other player I just started ignoring.  He eventually fell in line with what the group wanted to do.



My natural tendency for "convincing the characters" is to drop into meta-speak.  I just ask, "What would it take to get you guys to go along with this?" and we negotiate.  Works as long the players aren't dicks.  But then you get players like the two I mentioned above...





> And has a system to do with controlling how you give in.



And I'm specially keen to see how this plays with my current group.  I have a terrible feeling FATE will not gain traction with them.  It's too "soft" and "narrativy" for them.  But we'll see.  One of them's a LARPer and you get any softer or narrativy than LARPing.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 1, 2014)

Sadras said:


> Flexible backstory? Are we saying players can  change their characters backgrounds every x period of time or when they  fee like it? Or is it flexible due to the allowance of increasing  character backstory content?




If I've understood  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s meaning, the clearest cut example of Flexible Backstory is  Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World.  In it the GM is instructed to prepare  _absolutely nothing_ before character creation.  How the world actually works is revealed to _both_ the GM and the players in the course of play.

And  Apocalypse World and its spinoff Monsterhearts are the two most  immersive RPGs I know, with in play the two most immediate worlds and  with the characters being embedded in the setting in a way that no  pre-existing world can match.



> How would you discourage players deciding that their 1st  level characters from crossing the Altan Peaks (dangerous group of  mountains for 1st levels in Mystara)? I mean they already know every  encounter is based on level not on an intuitive world, so the dragons  they will encounter will be of a comparable level as will the giants?




This is a strawman.  If you want higher level areas have higher level areas.



> Yes and no, D&Ders have been making house-rules for the  sim-approach for years. Wounds, Fatigue, DR, Recovery rates...etc just  to name a few. Even 4e has it's inherent bonus - trying to emulate a  setting which I dare say lends towards a sim-approach.




 4E is in my opinion the best fantasy sim edition of D&D ever.



> The way I see it sports continues to evolve, adding more  regulations and limitations not so much for the refs but for the abusive  players. D&D isn't the exception, where humans just become these  amazingly creatures, this gene must be isolated to rpgers




If  the ref started kicking the ball around they wouldn't just be a  referee.  They'd be a player as well.  The second the DM picks up the  dice they cease to be an entirely disinterested referee. This is a bug  in some styles of game (really old school dungeon crawling) and a  feature in others (White Wolf calling the GM the Storyteller) - but in  all it is a fact of life.  There is far more scope for a player who can  send other players off to be abusive than there is for one who can't.



> What  is and isn't broken is dependent on the group, but non-magical charm  (diplomacy) is not an isolated incident.




Neither is the DMPC. Nor the Monty Haul DM.  Nor the Railroading  Storyteller.  Nor the DM's Girlfriend.  Also using diplomacy is a matter  of using the rules as they were designed.  That's a game design issue.


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## Sadras (Jul 1, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> If I've understood  @_*pemerton*_'s meaning, the clearest cut example of Flexible Backstory is  Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World.  In it the GM is instructed to prepare  _absolutely nothing_ before character creation.  How the world actually works is revealed to _both_ the GM and the players in the course of play.




Ah thanks. Will check out the references. I've seen this style before in the RPG Summerland and it formed part of the system, perhaps the idea was taken from Apocalypse World. 



> This is a strawman.  If you want higher level areas have higher level areas.




Manbearcat and Pemerton were discussing their style of play as opposed to the 'living, breathing world' and the benefits that stem from it. I was attempting to reflect the benefits of 'living, breathing world' as opposed to designed encounter level challenges. Perhaps I wasn't clear in my example. I will await Pemerton's reply. 



> If  the ref started kicking the ball around they wouldn't just be a  referee.  They'd be a player as well.  The second the DM picks up the  dice they cease to be an entirely disinterested referee. This is a bug  in some styles of game (really old school dungeon crawling) and a  feature in others (White Wolf calling the GM the Storyteller) - but in  all it is a fact of life.  There is far more scope for a player who can  send other players off to be abusive than there is for one who can't.




Fair enough.



> Neither is the DMPC. Nor the Monty Haul DM.  Nor the Railroading  Storyteller.  Nor the DM's Girlfriend.  Also using diplomacy is a matter  of using the rules as they were designed.  That's a game design issue.




Yes, but one would make house-rules to change that, from my perception to curb player abuse stemming from bad game design, while presumably you indicated that the house-rule was used to increase DM control.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 1, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> ok, but what about when you sit down to watch a 5 season run of Justice league, and the end bad guy of season 1 is a Manhunter, and half way through season 3 they fight three man hunters... and the season 4 finaly is 200 manhunters, and right before the fight there is an obvious up grade in powers (superman sun dips,Green lantern becomes Ion, ect) because that is much closer to my example...
> 
> Most people I know would consider it awesome that we showed how there characters grew... how the biggest most powerful threat they saw at level 1, something they had to run from...became later just part of the army they slaughtered... by the way the leader of the Army was "Kingdom" and he was a level 21 solo+ (my own design with 3 full initative counts, hp over level, and interrupts and reactions for each set of actions)




The thing is - you could have had that exact same storyline in other editions of D&D without changing the monsters' stats from level to level.  The PCs start out at 1st level fighting something like, say, a humanoid with ogre stats (still too weak?) and then by 11th level, that's no challenge any more.  Your example does not actually support a need for minion rules - just that you used the minion rules as intended by the designer.

So my point remains - for some people it works, and for some it doesn't.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 1, 2014)

Sadras said:


> Ah thanks. Will check out the references. I've  seen this style before in the RPG Summerland and formed part of the  system, perhaps the idea wasn't taken from Apocalypse World.




It wasn't - and Summerland predates Apocalypse World.  In AW Vincent  Baker wrote down what he does in his best games and made them DMing  guidance (along with quite a few other good ideas).



> Yes, but one would make house-rules to change that, from my  perception to curb player abuse stemming from bad game design, while  presumably you indicated that the house-rule was used to increase DM  control.




And in cases like Diplomacy I blame the game designers.



Savage Wombat said:


> The thing is - you could have had that  exact same storyline in other editions of D&D without changing the  monsters' stats from level to level.  The PCs start out at 1st level  fighting something like, say, a humanoid with ogre stats (still too  weak?) and then by 11th level, that's no challenge any more.  Your  example does not actually support a need for minion rules - just that  you used the minion rules as intended by the designer.
> 
> So my point remains - for some people it works, and for some it doesn't.




OK.  You don't like minion rules?  *Don't Use Them!*  It's quite simple.  There is nothing saying you _must_  minionise monsters at higher level - almost the reverse.  For those of  us who like them they improve the game - but there is literally nowhere  in the rules saying that the DM must make this choice.  However for some  of us it adds interest, challenge, and immersion to the setting and  breaks away from the utterly artificial, Order of the Stick like nature  of hit points.

Why are you objecting to us having tools we like?


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## pemerton (Jul 1, 2014)

Sadras said:


> Manbearcat and Pemerton were discussing their style of play as opposed to the 'living, breathing world'



By "living, breathing world" I was referring to the style of play that puzzled [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], namely setting out backstory in advance, and statting it all up (either literally or notionally), even though this is not for the purposes of creating a classic Gygaxian/Pulsipherian challenge game. (An example would be where the GM has decided that (say) the mayor of the village has such-and-such stats, even though there is no expectation that the players are meant to learn what those stats are and use that knowledge as a resource for their own clever play.)



Sadras said:


> Flexible backstory? Are we saying players can change their characters backgrounds every x period of time or when they fee like it?



I'm not referring particularly to PC backstory, although that can be flexible too. I'm referring primarily to world backstory. Ie, the stuff that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] was talking about in his post.

For instance, and to take an example from my own campaign: _why_ is the Raven Queen on good terms with Kas, even though she hates undead and Kas is a vampire lord? I don't know - although it has been established in play that she is on good terms with him, the reason for this hasn't been established yet. When the time comes for me to make a decision, I will be doing my best to make a decision with maximum dramatic heft, both in terms of shock value and generating momentum.

To give a PC-oriented example: it turned out that the human wizard in my campaign was really a deva who had taken human form, and lost his memories, for one of his incarnations. But when he died fighting an angel of Bane, he was reborn once more as a deva and regained his memory of 1000 lifetimes.

The PC had been in play from 1st level. This particular bit of backstory was brought to light at 16th level.

In general, when I refer to "flexible backstory" I am referring to the technique which holds that no backstory is firmly established until it is actually narrated in play, either by a player or (more often) by the GM. The most hardcore form of flexible backstory is no myth.

An additional feature of flexible backstory is not determining the mechanical representation of a gameworld element until it is needed for play. In 4e, this means using all the monster-building tools that have been discussd in this thread. In Robin Laws' HeroQuest revised, this means using the system for setting DCs, where the DCs are higher the more successes in a row the players have had. In Burning Wheel - which uses "objecive" rather than "level appropriate" DCs - the Adventure Burner (which is that game's equivalent of a GM's guide) suggests not statting up the big bad until the last feasible moment of prep, because you want that NPC, in mechanical terms, to be a suitable challenge for the PCs.

Or to refer again to the village mayor example, there would be no need to stat up the village mayor until those stats were actually going to matter to an action resolution declared by the players. (In 4e this would mostly be combat - because non-combat in 4e is resovled via skill challenges, which is a players-roll-all-the-dice technique in which the you don't need to give stats to the NPCs who are part of the scene in order to work out the DCs - you just need narative descriptions like "not very brave" or "as a matter of pride, unwilling to compromise".)



Sadras said:


> How would you discourage players deciding that their 1st level characters from crossing the Altan Peaks (dangerous group of mountains for 1st levels in Mystara)? I mean they already know every encounter is based on level not on an intuitive world, so the dragons they will encounter will be of a comparable level as will the giants?



This is not an example of flexible backstory. In fact, it seems to be an example of exactly the opposite. If, in the course of play, I present the players with the opportunity to have their PCs explore the Altan Peaks, why would I then try to discourage them? That just looks like bad GMing to me. If I present them with the Altan Peaks, then the backstory of the world is going to include the Altan Peaks being the sort of place the PCs might try and cross.

To give an example from actual play: in the default "story arc" of 4e, PCs start at heroic tier - able to help villagers, fight orcs and goblins, etc - then advance to paragon tier - able to defend nations and enter the Underdark - and then advance to epic tier - able to travel the planes and challenge the gods and primordials.

When my campaign started at heroic tier I didn't frame the PCs into situations that were obviously incongruous for that tier - eg present them with an invasion by duergar or drow. I framed them into situations that fit with that tier - defending a homestead from goblin marauders, sneaking into a hobgoblin fortress, recovering a stolen elven idol from a haunted island temple, etc.

When the game advanced to paragon tier, the nature of the challenges presented likewise changed. The PCs got the opportunity to take the battle to the hobgoblin army, where the five of them defeated an entire army (but not without losing their wizard, as described in the post linked to upthread). Now that they are epic tier, the challenges have changed yet again: they are on the Feywild trying to end the War of Seasons between Winter and Summer Fey, by defeating the army of frost giants mustered by Lolth in cooperation with the Prince of Frost.

If I were to present my players, with 1st level PCs, with a situation in which the most immediate and pressing threat was a war with frost giants, and then reminded them that, as 1st level PCs their prospects of hurting 17th level giants were pretty slim, I don't think I'd be doing a very good job of GMing. Likewise if I presented them with the Altan Peaks (at least as you describe them). 



Sadras said:


> Perhaps 'living, breathing world' allows for players to make more informed decisions, based primarily on their previous experiences and knowledge.
> The characters are much more imbedded into the setting - with the deities laws, dangerous locales, belief of superstitions...etc
> 
> In the absence of 'living, breathing world' everything is possible at the get go since one is continuously running level-based combat challengers which is, one could argue, but an exercise in die rolling.



This makes no sense to me. I don't see any connection between the technique used to establish backstory and mechanical representation of gameworld elements, and combat.

For instance, White Plume Mountain is a pre-authored scenario - both fiction and stats - but any group playing through White Plume Mountain is going to have to engage in quite a bit of combat. Conversely, here is a write up of the design and play of a scenario which was primarily exploration rather than content, but which used relatively little pre-establihsed backstory. It illustrates how players can make decisions based on previus experience and knowledge whether or not the GM has pre-authored and pre-statted the aspects of the gameworld that the PCs are dealing with.



Sadras said:


> Sure there is the illusion of meaningful choices being made, which ability to use first in combination with which allies' abilities, how to use terrain..etc  and the consequences are the same, worst case scenario one's character dies BUT one knows that EVERY challenge is based on their level and it doesn't have to be intuitive with the world at all.



I don't really have any idea what this is about. I don't know what you mean by "intuitive with the world". If the PCs are fighting some creatures, than those creatures _are_ the gameworld. And if the choices that the players make don't have any meaning either for the resolution of the encounter, nor for the broader context of the campaign, then I don't see what the point of the combat is at all.



Savage Wombat said:


> The thing is - you could have had that exact same storyline in other editions of D&D without changing the monsters' stats from level to level.



That's not in dispute (though in 3E wouldn't it be incredibly tedious to play out?). I also noted upthread that, in 5e, bouned accuracy is meant to handle this (though I worry a bit about tediousness there too). The point of the example is to rebut the claim that the 4e method entails an inconsistency of gameworld and of mechanics.



Neonchameleon said:


> 4E is in my opinion the best fantasy sim edition of D&D ever.



But it's not process sim. It doesn't determine outcomes by modelling the processes that occur in the gameworld. Rather, it uses a large does of fortune-in-the-middle and relies upon both players and GM having a good sense of genre constraints (including the specifications of the differences between tiers) in order to achieve heroic fantasy outcomes.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 1, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> OK.  You don't like minion rules?  *Don't Use Them!*  It's quite simple.  There is nothing saying you _must_  minionise monsters at higher level - almost the reverse.  For those of  us who like them they improve the game - but there is literally nowhere  in the rules saying that the DM must make this choice.  However for some  of us it adds interest, challenge, and immersion to the setting and  breaks away from the utterly artificial, Order of the Stick like nature  of hit points.
> 
> Why are you objecting to us having tools we like?




I'm not objecting to you using whatever tools you like.  You (and your opponents) are the ones engaging in debate, attempting to persuade the other side of the superiority of your perception of the system.  If I disagree with a particular argument - for example, that "portraying creatures with different stats at different game points is more engaging drama" - I am free to counter that point with "I don't feel I would be engaged by that as you suggest".

If this whole thing were about "play what you like" there wouldn't be a discussion, much less argument.  This argument is about why some people see a particular model of game reality (hit points) as superior to another.  And why they feel that their model is a superior one to include in a published product.


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## Nagol (Jul 1, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> For instance, perhaps you're referring to a revelation or an omen of ill portent where the resolution of "It" is low at its inception.  "It" does something concrete that perturbs the world, interfacing with the PCs in some way (either peripherally or directly).  The PCs do not proactively involve themselves with whatever conflict "it" is pushing.  "It" does more concrete things and therefore its malleability recedes until "It" is made wholly rigid due to either (i) a requisite number of concrete things "It" has done (which establishes its nature) or (ii) "It" gets up close and personal with the PCs because they seek "It" out.  When it appears inevitable that it will reach (i) or (ii), "It" is mechanically iterated.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I understand what you're describing, but, if you wouldn't mind, could you provide an example from your table?





The description above covers two different tools I use.

The first is creation of new game assets.  

I create small after-action reports for myself.  The primary purpose is to collect world results so as to determine consequence/world reaction and to collect loose ends -- those things that happened or were discovered by the table through play that do not currently have a known cause.

I review my loose thread file and look for a cause that can be the rationale for one or more threads.  Once I'm inspired, I'll review constraints on the potential of the asset (minimum/maximum strength, breadth of operation, known intelligence by other groups, etc.) so the insertion provides no contradiction for table history.  If the asset is still viable, I'll design the asset, attach the threads to it, and add it to my "default future-history" timeline (what will happen assuming the PCs do nothing to cause any alterations).

The asset now "exists".  It will react to PC actions that are of interest to it and it will continue to cause effects in the universe for the PCs to detect and interact with as it exerts an influence on the area around it.

Asset reaction is my second major tool.  Assets will react to PC action, to each other, and to the passage of time.  The way assets react is constrained by their nature, their strength, breadth of operation, and their knowledge.

Here's a simple example.  While on an overland mission, the party is attacked a few times by the same random encounter: cultists.  Normally this encounter is rare.  There is no game asset in the area that can account for the activity.  The history for the area notes a diabolic coven was burned out of the area about a century ago.  Could a new coven be forming?  Other loose ends include rumours fed to the group about missing townsfolk -- the townsfolk are blaming the dryads in the faerie woods.  If a coven were trying to move into the area, what would be attracting it?  Until now no one has raised an alarm or mentioned unusual events so the group has to be small and circumspect but large enough it can tolerate the losses from the encounters.  Using the area maps I note a abandoned logging camp not too far from a couple of the attack sites.  The camp notes a few small fae creatures call it home.  If the coven wants to move in here it will have to dislocate the fae.

So using the constraints determined, I figure the coven could exist but would require a minimum level 7 leader to account for the strength of those already encountered.  The coven is seeking the original coven site as it believes an item of power lies forgotten in the ashes.  Considering the area, if the leader were 9th level or higher, available magic would circumvent the need for manual searching to a degree that the encounters wouldn't have happened.

So I add the remnants of a coven led by a 7-8th level character.  Effects on the game world: 
Displaced fay will begin to appear in nearby locations complaining to the local druids about humans who break the treaties
Others traveling in the area will report encountering similar cultists (if powerful enough to survive) or just go missing
Quiet recruitment in the area and further afield to make up for losses suffered

The coven is added to the timeline  with actions (searching for site for next 83 days, setting up to excavate the site in 90 days, discovery by local druids in 76 days), other assets get new actions (druids look for help investigating faerie claims in 15 days, seek out problem themselves in 70 days if no help forthcoming).


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## GMforPowergamers (Jul 1, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> The thing is - you could have had that exact same storyline in other editions of D&D without changing the monsters' stats from level to level.  The PCs start out at 1st level fighting something like, say, a humanoid with ogre stats (still too weak?) and then by 11th level, that's no challenge any more.  Your example does not actually support a need for minion rules - just that you used the minion rules as intended by the designer.
> 
> So my point remains - for some people it works, and for some it doesn't.




What are you talking about?

My example was of a constant threat yours was of a one time threat now a joke


What level do you think a wizard can one on one an Oger in melee in 3e... My beat is long before 11th

The fighter can dance through an army provoking I'll attacks singing "can't touch this" by that point but the minons are still a threat


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## TwoSix (Jul 1, 2014)

pemerton said:


> By "living, breathing world" I was referring to the style of play that puzzled [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], namely setting out backstory in advance, and statting it all up (either literally or notionally), even though this is not for the purposes of creating a classic Gygaxian/Pulsipherian challenge game. (An example would be where the GM has decided that (say) the mayor of the village has such-and-such stats, even though there is no expectation that the players are meant to learn what those stats are and use that knowledge as a resource for their own clever play.)



I believe the term for that may be "onanistic world design", although, to be fair, I might be making that up.


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## Nagol (Jul 1, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> I believe the term for that may be "onanistic world design", although, to be fair, I might be making that up.




And being both crude and patronising as you do


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## TwoSix (Jul 1, 2014)

Nagol said:


> And being both crude and patronising as you do



Hey now.  Crude, certainly.   But not patronizing.  I like a fleshed-out campaign setting as much as the next guy.  I just think detailing the game world down to the stats of the village blacksmith is, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, actively detrimental to good gaming.

It encourages the "look at my cool world!" style of DMing as opposed to "let's promote the action of the PCs" style that I find almost always makes for a more successful game.

And let's be honest.  While there's plenty of DMs who work on detailed settings simply for the love of world-building, there's also quite a few who use it as a channel for their raging narcissism.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 1, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> I believe the term for that may be "onanistic world design", although, to be fair, I might be making that up.




That seems like a needlessly judgmental term, to me, as someone who can take or leave either form of world design (and the many between them). I mean, if someone whittles bits of wood for their own amusement, not for others to see, do we call them a wood-wanker? 

I get a bit of the hostility because it can be part of a set of behaviours that suck, namely the whole "It's my world, you're just living in it!" deal, which is often accompanied by horrible GMPCs, extreme hostility to the PCs making world-altering decisions, extreme railroading, and excessive DM fiat to protect said world.

But that's not always the way, and some players genuinely want to be living in someone else's world (whether the DM's or a pre-made setting or whatever), and not all DMs who enjoy crafting a world are frustrated novelists and/or power-mad dictators who don't really want anyone touching their toys except as directed (there is a certain percentage, of course).


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## TwoSix (Jul 1, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> That seems like a needlessly judgmental term, to me, as someone who can take or leave either form of world design (and the many between them). I mean, if someone whittles bits of wood for their own amusement, not for others to see, do we call them a wood-wanker?



If I need a term for someone who feverishly works away at something (call it "X") in complete solitude for their own personal pleasure, I could do a lot worse than "X-wanker".


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 1, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> If I need a term for someone who feverishly works away at something (call it "X") in complete solitude for their own personal pleasure, I could do a lot worse than "X-wanker".




You could, but there's something... hostile to people who don't follow the "norms of society", in that perspective that seems, I dunno, like something that should have been left in the 20th century, not pushed onwards in the 21st.

I'm all about mocking DMs who want to railroad me and show me their precious little world BUT DON'T TOUCH, or who are convinced they are the next Tolkien (without justification - if with, I will be impressed!  ), but I dunno, sometimes even I have enjoyed crafting settings I might never actually use (though I tend to go more macro than micro), and doing that has made me a better DM, and better able to make stuff up on the fly.

So why judge, man? If they're harshing your groove in an actual game, sure, but if they're in their own room, doing their thing, I'm not going to look down on them.


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## TwoSix (Jul 1, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> So why judge, man? If they're harshing your groove in an actual game, sure, but if they're in their own room, doing their thing, I'm not going to look down on them.



Honestly, I judge because the stereotype of the overprepared DM can be actively harmful to allowing new people to DM, if that stereotype is the expectation of some of the players.  It's perfectly okay NOT to have a deep world all defined for the players.  

Plus, are "onanistic" and "wanker" all that pejorative?  Everybody does it, man.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 1, 2014)

> Plus, are "onanistic" and "wanker" all that pejorative?




Umm, yeah.  Very much so in some circles.


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## Pickles JG (Jul 1, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Lan-"it just shouldn't be possible for someone named Terry the Butcher to have a decent Diplomacy skill"-efan




He used to play for England in the 80s
Terry Butcher


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 1, 2014)

GMforPowergamers said:


> What are you talking about?
> 
> My example was of a constant threat yours was of a one time threat now a joke
> 
> ...




Well, I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your point.  If you meant that the same monster is still a threat despite a massive power shift among the PCs, I don't find that any more "believable".  But in this case the issue is less about HP and monster construction, it's about how most versions of D&D don't handle the continuing threat of the same monster well.  

Personally, I'd rather model that directly by the monsters getting tougher over time (in the fiction) to match the PCs, rather than saying it's the same monster but I changed the stats so he's still a challenge.  Although I'm reading my own sentence and I don't think I'm explaining myself well.  Oh well.


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> So a 25th level Fighter is no better at placing blows to bypass the opponents defences than a 3rd level one. They can't possibly land blows from directions the frost giant can't predict and avoid and which land in critical places so the giant is put out of the fight by one blow.



Obviously the 25th-level type is better at what he does than his 3rd-level self; and the combat will be shorter.  But"shorter" doesn't necessarily equate to "one-hit kill" and nor should it (I'll ignore critical hits for this discussion); if the Giant has 95 h.p. and Toughnose the Fighter-25 hits it for 36, that Giant's still around and (in 4e terms) isn't even bloodied yet.  Chances are ol' Toughnose is only going to miss on a '1' so the Giant's chance of survival is mighty close to nil, what matters is how long the Giant hangs around to clobber Toughnose - sure his AC might be in the lower stratosphere but Giants tend to hurt you when they hit you and the more chances they get the more likely Toughnose's nose might get a little bent.

Lanefan


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## TwoSix (Jul 1, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Umm, yeah.  Very much so in some circles.




Now that's funny!


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## Pickles JG (Jul 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right?  It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.




Try to find Pi or even 1 in reality. The numbers do not exist but its a lot easier to find real world analogues if your field of mathematics stretches only as far as arithmetic with positive whole numbers than anything involving square roots &c.

If a theory uses maths that predicts something the physicist cant find than the theory is wrong but may be good enough for practical purposes like building computers. See newtonian mechanics for macroscopic entities.


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## Lanefan (Jul 1, 2014)

Pickles JG said:


> He used to play for England in the 80s
> Terry Butcher
> View attachment 62465



That's hilarious! 

Lan-"is footballer the next adventuring class?"-efan


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right?  It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.




There's a difference between the way mathematicians and physicists are using math.  For a mathematician, it is very possible to have a number show up that doesn't make sense in the physical world.  Nonsensical numbers don't impinge the validity of pure math.

Physicists, OTOH, are using mathematical models of the real world to understand how the RW works.  Their number originate in and are confirmed by experimentation.  So if something shows up in the math that does not show up in reality, the model is wrong.  Ditto if something occurs that is NOT predicted or modeled by the math.


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## Hussar (Jul 2, 2014)

You're missing my point about reification [MENTION=5875]dan[/MENTION]nyA. The problem comes when physicists try to treat math as having direct, real world existence. They are trying to make the abstraction real. It doesn't work because math is full of stuff that is really useful in math but has no real world existence. 

The same thing generally applies to this hp issue. The  only thing hp model is how hard it is to kill something. That's it. It might be for any number of reasons but all hps model is how hard it is to kill something. 

But people try to reify hps to mean all sorts of things and them try to claim that this is what hps represented all the way along. It's a very shakey house with virtually no actual supporting evidence.


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## Sadras (Jul 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> By "living, breathing world" I was referring to the style of play that puzzled @_*Manbearcat*_, namely setting out backstory in advance, and statting it all up (either literally or notionally), even though this is not for the purposes of creating a classic Gygaxian/Pulsipherian challenge game. (An example would be where the GM has decided that (say) the mayor of the village has such-and-such stats, even though there is no expectation that the players are meant to learn what those stats are and use that knowledge as a resource for their own clever play.)
> 
> I'm not referring particularly to PC backstory, although that can be flexible too. I'm referring primarily to world backstory. Ie, the stuff that @_*Manbearcat*_ was talking about in his post.
> 
> For instance, and to take an example from my own campaign: _why_ is the Raven Queen on good terms with Kas, even though she hates undead and Kas is a vampire lord? I don't know - although it has been established in play that she is on good terms with him, the reason for this hasn't been established yet. When the time comes for me to make a decision, I will be doing my best to make a decision with maximum dramatic heft, both in terms of shock value and generating momentum.




Thanks. I misunderstood a little thats why some of my response doesn't make sense. 



> To give a PC-oriented example: it turned out that the human wizard in my campaign was really a deva who had taken human form, and lost his memories, for one of his incarnations. But when he died fighting an angel of Bane, he was reborn once more as a deva and regained his memory of 1000 lifetimes.
> 
> The PC had been in play from 1st level. This particular bit of backstory was brought to light at 16th level.




I like this, but given my perception of your dming style from posts of yours, I would imagine this was the PC's idea or am I wrong on this assumption? If this idea was entirely hatched up by the DM and he placed this in the PCs backstory without consultation with the PC, would you have an issue with it? I'm just trying to understand how much of an input you allow the DM.




> An additional feature of flexible backstory is not determining the mechanical representation of a gameworld element until it is needed for play. In 4e, this means using all the monster-building tools that have been discussd in this thread. In Robin Laws' HeroQuest revised, this means using the system for setting DCs, where the DCs are higher the more successes in a row the players have had. In Burning Wheel - which uses "objecive" rather than "level appropriate" DCs - the Adventure Burner (which is that game's equivalent of a GM's guide) suggests not statting up the big bad until the last feasible moment of prep, because you want that NPC, in mechanical terms, to be a suitable challenge for the PCs.




I'm not a fan of the latter idea from the Adventure Burner. It would suggest that PCs can expend all their dallies and specials on the little fights before the big bad and as DM you would have to scale down the big bad for it to be a suitable challenge for the PCs when they do encounter him. This is where it seems the world is not intuitive/natural. As DM the Adventure Burner seems to suggest deliberately manipulating the big bad for a fair challenge as opposed to preparing the monster and so what happens during the adventure/session does not affect your big bad unless it was part of the in-game fiction influenced by the PCs. I'm more of a fan of let the chips fall where they fall.


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Sadras said:


> I like this, but given my perception of your dming style from posts of yours, I would imagine this was the PC's idea or am I wrong on this assumption?



It was the player's idea. At the start of the campaign his wizard had, as backstory, former cultist of the Raven Queen. Over the course of play (15 levels, approximately 3 years in real life) his PC became increasingly connected to a range of gods, and was a multi-class invoker. He decided the PC would make more sense rebuilt as a deva invoker multi-classed to wizard. (In 4e multi-classing is a feat that gives you modest abilities associated with the multi-class.) The actual transition events we worked out together - eg I think I'm the one who suggested that his imp familiar would be a spy for Levistus, placed there on instructions from Bane.



Sadras said:


> If this idea was entirely hatched up by the DM and he placed this in the PCs backstory without consultation with the PC, would you have an issue with it?



A big issue, yes.

I don't mind the GM springing surprises on the player, even including surprises about PC backstory. But the player has to have asked for it (either expressly or implicitly) so that it fits with where the player is taking the PC. Eg with the same PC, back when he was still a human, I placed an encounter with his mother as a prisoner in a goblin cavern complex. This made sense given the player-author backstory (family scattered when they fled their home city as refugees following a humanoid assault). But I decided to actually introduce the PC's mother into the game.

In my view there can be no hard-and-fast rules here, because different players have different degrees of tolerance for GM surprises, and different degrees of desire to have the GM pick up on their backstory and run with it. That said, I wouldn't want to run a game in which every player is a turtle who retreats into his/her shell at the merest hint of GM playing with backstory. That doesn't sound like very much fun to me.



Sadras said:


> I'm not a fan of the latter idea from the Adventure Burner. It would suggest that PCs can expend all their dallies and specials on the little fights before the big bad and as DM you would have to scale down the big bad for it to be a suitable challenge for the PCs when they do encounter him. This is where it seems the world is not intuitive/natural. As DM the Adventure Burner seems to suggest deliberately manipulating the big bad for a fair challenge as opposed to preparing the monster and so what happens during the adventure/session does not affect your big bad unless it was part of the in-game fiction influenced by the PCs. I'm more of a fan of let the chips fall where they fall.



I think the Adventure Burner advice is a bit conflicted. Burning Wheel is based - and very strongly based - around "objective" DCs. But by D&D standards it has relatively modest scaling, in part to make those objective DCs workable in a practical sense. It also has a range of devices - both mechanical and GMing techniques - to handle PC failure, which is expected to occur much more frequently than is the case in D&D. So it's very much a "chips fall where they fall" system.

The main worry that motivates the Adventure Burner advice is that if you stat up the NPC too early, the actual resolution of what should be an epic confrontation will fall flat, for rocket-tag type reasons (on one or the other sides). Once you know what the PCs will look like, mechanically, when they meet the big bad (BW doesn't have levels, but rather skill numbers) then you can set the big bad. There is nothing really analogous in BW to expending dailies or specials, so there's no particular need to modulate difficulty to reflect the PC status when they encounter the NPC. (BW does have fate points and similar things, but the game is designed so that the players should be accruing plenty of them as they come into their final confrontation - if they are not, then the gameplay has misfired in much bigger ways than are involved in statting up an NPC.)

Because D&D doesn't have modest scaling (even 5e has very rapidly scaling hp), and doesn't have the devices BW uses to handle PC failure, and is chock full of dailies and similar "specials", I don't think the BW advice is immediately applicable. At best it can be suggestive.

Finally, on this point, I don't get the bit about intuitive/natural. The NPC has no stats until the GM writes them. Provided the stats that the GM writes up are consistent with what has actually been established, in prior play, about the NPC, how is one set of stats more or less intuitive/natural than another? Eg if all we know about the NPC wizard is that (i) she has lots of followers, and (ii) she once cast a Gate spell, then either of the following strikes me as equally intuitive/natural:

(A) She is a high level wizard who can memorise and cast Gate and wields a Rod of Rulership;

(B) She is a modest level wizard who has a high CHA, as well as an empty parchment in her library that once was a scroll with a Gate spell on it.​
I don't see how it makes any difference to the verisimilitude of the play experience if the GM decides this in advance, or on the spot.


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Chances are ol' Toughnose is only going to miss on a '1' so the Giant's chance of survival is mighty close to nil, what matters is how long the Giant hangs around to clobber Toughnose - sure his AC might be in the lower stratosphere but Giants tend to hurt you when they hit you and the more chances they get the more likely Toughnose's nose might get a little bent.



The point about minions is that they just provide a different mathematical configuration for working this out.

Defences up, to hit up, defences down, damage down. I posted a worked example upthread.


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## Lanefan (Jul 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The point about minions is that they just provide a different mathematical configuration for working this out.



I get that.  I also think it's both unnecessary and destructive to internal consistency that a given monster can have two or three or four sets of numbers attached depending solely on what it's fighting.

Let's look at it another way.  You've got a 4th-level PC with 35 h.p. (I think that number's possible in any edition), and no matter what it does or where it goes or who it fights - a single defenseless peasant or a couple of Bugbears or a cadre of Giants - it still has those 35 h.p. along with all the other attributes and abilities that go with its class, race, level, and equipment.  A monster or NPC should work just the same as this - a particular individual at a particular time has the h.p. and attributes and abilities that go with its race, class (if any), level or HD or equivalent, and equipment (if any) regardless of and independent from the capabilities of whatever is challenging it to a fight.  Either that, or PCs' abilities should change to suit their opponents; which would be equally as bad.

During world design if I put a mountain on the northeast corner of the map and stick a Giant in there, that Giant's got 95 h.p. (if it hasn't been hurt) no matter whether the party encounter it at 1st level or 5th or 15th.  In my current campaign I stuck a lich's hidden lair in a particular spot with an end-game adventure in mind, and then had a 3rd-level party come within a whisker of blundering right into it during another adventure in the same area.  Had they done so they might not all have died but the alternative would be (by choice or by force) serving a new master whose aims and goals aren't exactly nice; and turning the campaign on its ear in the process.

That lich had the same stats then as it does now and most likely will when eventually met.  So do all his various servants, pets, buddies, and so forth; they'd have been no different if the 3rd-level group walked in than they'll be when the 10th-level group gets there.  I fail to see why this is a problem; I further fail to grasp what the 4e designers were thinking when they dreamed up the system you've been explaining, unless they had intentionally decided to throw internal consistency to the winds.

Lanefan


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> I also think it's both unnecessary and destructive to internal consistency that a given monster can have two or three or four sets of numbers attached depending solely on what it's fighting.



The "necessity" arises from the desire to have smooth and engaging gameplay. It's the same reason that most people, if they want to run a combat of 100 vs 100, will look for mechanical tooset other than core D&D combat. (I gather 5e is going to come with such a Battlesystem built in.)

As to "destructive to internal consistency", how so? What internal consistency has been destroyed? If the toughness of the ogre, or giant, or whatever, is constant, where is the destruction? Heck, I've preserved internal consistency of gameworlds across _changes in system_ eg from D&D to Rolemaster.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 2, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Personally, I'd rather model that directly by the monsters getting tougher over time (in the fiction) to match the PCs, rather than saying it's the same monster but I changed the stats so he's still a challenge.  Although I'm reading my own sentence and I don't think I'm explaining myself well.  Oh well.




The monster in question is normally _dead_.  Seriously, how many monsters survive a round with PCs?



Lanefan said:


> Obviously the 25th-level type is better at what he does than his 3rd-level self; and the combat will be shorter.  But"shorter" doesn't necessarily equate to "one-hit kill" and nor should it




I notice you're no longer using ogres as your example here 

And if the fighter is missing on a 1 and the giant is hitting on a 20 do you really think the fight is worth fighting out in detail?


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## Manbearcat (Jul 2, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> I get that.  I also think it's both unnecessary and destructive to internal consistency that a given monster can have two or three or four sets of numbers attached depending solely on what it's fighting.




How about in the same encounter?  Recently, the player in my PBP on here fought a giant, tentacled, sea monster riffed off the Darkmantle.  The PC and NPCs were on a boat.  The setup was thus:

- A flatboat being attacked from below by the sea monster.

- NPC daughter who was a Minion and had a trait to buff her defenses when adjacent to her father, an at-will to "get tiny" such that she makes herself a non-target, and an Encounter Move Action to squirm out of trouble.

- NPC father who was a Standard Soldier who had several means to protect his daughter; at-will immediate interrupt to take an attack for her and then deal one in return, an Encounter power to give her temp HP and do AoE damage, an at-will mark attack with the long-oar he was using as a polearm.

- The Sea Monster.  This creature was mechanically iterated as 4 parts.  

1)  Minion tentacles that would grope, grab, and pull you into the water.  These were up at the beginning for a few rounds before the sea monster proper reared its head.  A foreshadowing.

2)  Challenging Terrain around the boat which were the many unseen tentacles that would grasp and pull you down into the depths to be drown and devoured.

3)  The Elite Sea Monster itself which had an aura and its own suite of attacks; a 'rock the boat attack" that knocked people into the water (refreshed on bloodied), its own tentacle attacks (that did damage and grabbed and pulled people into the water), and it could also "summon (mechanically)" several "summoned tentacles" (basically minions that, when killed, cause damage to the Elite itself) that it could channel attacks through as a Minor Action.


I would assume that knowledge of the machinery of these make-believe things would be problematic for internal consistency and thus immersion for you (and for others)?  In play, these mechanical components all worked to enhance emotional investment, dramatic tension, and overall immersion for the player.  It was pretty awesome.  The little girl narrowly escaped death on several occasions as the PC and NPC worked to protect her while slaying the beast (and surviving themselves) and the NPC (father) was almost drowned in the effort.  It was a desperate, frightening battle in fighting the beast in its own element.  

My guess is that, if I ran the fight 20 times, the girl (minion) would perish perhaps 8ish times (40ish % chance).  That is due to all of the various mechanical constructs at work (including PC and NPC tactical options).  The Minion rules (amongst others) were central to making this fight thematically and tactically deep.  Process simulation and symmetrical build components would never allow that % nor would it allow the kind of tactically rich choices made by the parties involved and the harrowing, narrow escapes.  The death rate of the little girl would have been extreme (19 out of 20 or more) regardless of the tactical decisions made by the involved parties.  Just the brunt force of the math and the lack of means to protect her would have dictated that.  That genre trope just couldn't become manifest, or at least not in any compelling way.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right?  It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.



Umm...it shows up plenty of places. Its just less obvious than the Natural Numbers. You could make the same argument about zero.


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## Nikosandros (Jul 2, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> Umm...it shows up plenty of places. Its just less obvious than the Natural Numbers. You could make the same argument about zero.



Numbers - and I mean all numbers, including natural ones, do not appear in nature. Numbers exist only in the mind as abstract tools that are immensely useful in modelling in a meaningful way the 'reality' around us. In that vein, imaginary numbers (i.e. the root of minus 1) are extremely useful. Just to cite a couple of instances they are used in electronics and they are part of the fundamental mathematical structure of Quantum Mechanics.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> You're missing my point about reification [MENTION=5875]dan[/MENTION]nyA. The problem comes when physicists try to treat math as having direct, real world existence. They are trying to make the abstraction real. It doesn't work because math is full of stuff that is really useful in math but has no real world existence.




I used to be a physicist and...that's not what physicists do, IME. As a species, they tend to be very tentative about declaring something real. At best, when referring to mathematical abstractions in physical models, most physicists would refer to their "reality" as irrelevant (barring evidence to the contrary). I mean, I've even had discussions about whether or not electrons are "real".

TBH, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], your paragraph sounds like " disgruntled studentism".

On the other hand, I agree with the general point that HP are hopelessly non-simulatory. In general, I find the whole Sim crowd a little incoherent. That is, physical worlds and laws cannot be used to simulate plot driven (or at least "plot aware") fantasy stories. The resistance to "meta" mechanics (and refusal to accept that HP are one) totally baffle me. It seems to me that the entire effort must be driven by other psychological motivations which remain unclear to me. (At least within the framework of DnD.)


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## Emerikol (Jul 2, 2014)

I will confess I've only read the first and last pages of this thread.  It seems active and anything active in the all D&D area is usually good conversation.


I do like to create most of the world (continent whatever) with the nations, rules, and major cities with stats.  I definitely create the Gods and the cosmos and all the major religions in detail including the practices of priesthood and paladins if appropriate.  

I like sandboxes so I will usually zoom in on a region and do that region in tremendous detail.  That is the sandbox.  I don't mind if the PCs want to leave but they realize that I've put a lot of effort into this expansive sandbox so there is consideration.   At the highest levels though they are definitely stretching the sandbox and traveling other places.

I prefer an objective view of npcs and monsters.  So their stats are their stats.  I wouldn't want to make a creature a solo then a standard and then a minion as the group advances.  That is another nick on 4e of course.   I don't mind organic natural progression that represents the development of an enemy by natural advancement.   So the BBEG could be a 12th level wizard in one adventure and a 15th level wizard later if it made sense the BBEG had advanced.

I'm very much into my players staying in actor stance.  I realize this is just one of many choices but it's the approach I prefer.  So I avoid metagaming like the plague.   I agree with Pemerton on surprises.  If it fits the backstory as known to me, I don't mind throwing out a surprise.   I am cognizant that threatening the well being of "dependents" is an overused trope so I don't wear out that approach.


I'll try to get the rest of this thread read in the meantime.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 2, 2014)

Nikosandros said:


> Numbers - and I mean all numbers, including natural ones, do not appear in nature. Numbers exist only in the mind as abstract tools that are immensely useful in modelling in a meaningful way the 'reality' around us. In that vein, imaginary numbers (i.e. the root of minus 1) are extremely useful. Just to cite a couple of instances they are used in electronics and they are part of the fundamental mathematical structure of Quantum Mechanics.



Umm...yes? I mean, you can say the same thing about a lot of stuff: color, your existence as a distinct entity, etc.

 However, I was responding to the challenge of "finding root -1" in nature. In the respect you are bringing up, that's no different than finding 4 in nature, except perhaps in the degree of effort needed to notice it.


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## Emerikol (Jul 2, 2014)

Okay I read some more and I realize this thread started out all about 3e brokenness.

I think my playstyle in general is a strong counterbalance to balance issues.  Maybe that style developed from making 1e work and going on from there.  I've always felt like the rogue/thief class was too weak in combat but I always made sure out of combat was really interesting and that was okay.   The fighter was always great in combat.  This is my bafflement because I realize it differs from the views of many people.

I think part of it is that rests are not guaranteed.  The number of encounters per day is variable but tend long.  So 5 or 6 average and not 4.  Magic items for the martials are plentiful and effective.   What I did though was not me reacting consciously to the game.  It was me just doing what I've been doing since 1e.   That playstyle I developed just naturally shielded me from these other issues.

I also know that in 1e/2e I was not averse to houseruling a spell that got out of hand.  Stoneskin I'm looking at you.  So my players in 3e, likely knew that any genuinely game breaking exploit that they found would ultimately be countered by me as DM.  So maybe they just didn't try.  I do know that my players are really good "players".  Strategically they make short work of anything considered appropriate per the DMG of any edition.  They may not in all cases be hyper great charOps guys.  They are decent I'm sure but they are not spending their Saturdays figuring out the ultimate broken combination.  Again that might be because they know in ten minutes I would negate that Saturdays work so why do it.   So in 3e, I really didn't run into problems.   

I do know people DMing 3e right now that really up the challenge far above what is faced normally.  So my guess is that they've found ways to improve the fighter through items (though arguably fitting to wealth by level) that the entire group is tougher.

Anyway that is my ramble on my 3e experience.  It's pretty close to my 2e and 1e experience though in those games I did on occasion houserule a spell.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 2, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> Honestly, I judge because the stereotype of the overprepared DM can be actively harmful to allowing new people to DM, if that stereotype is the expectation of some of the players.  It's perfectly okay NOT to have a deep world all defined for the players.
> 
> Plus, are "onanistic" and "wanker" all that pejorative?  Everybody does it, man.




You know perfectly well that they're pejoratives, come off it! 

I think you're moving the goalposts here, because you were initially complaining about DMs who spent "too much" time detailing the world and suggesting it was a masturbatory activity, and now you're claiming something quite different, which is that it is a "harmful stereotype", and that it's okay to not have a deep, defined world.

That doesn't really seem to be the same argument.

Further, you've conflated enjoying detailing stuff for one's own pleasure (ahem!) with being a sort of obsessively overprepared ultra-detailer and making everything think it has to be that way, and I don't think it's fair to conflate these things. Nor fair to blame someone who enjoys making detailed settings for "promoting a harmful stereotype". It's not his or her fault that this stereotype exists, and he or she shouldn't have to change their activities because of it.

It all just seems really like a bad approach to some real issues, one that makes people feel bad and demonised, whilst not actually solving anything or helping anyone. Calling people wankers for liking to detail stuff doesn't encourage people to realize that less-detailed worlds can work well, does it? In fact I feel it's likely to entrench and inflame opinions on the subject, if anything.

The real problems here, as far as I can see are:

1) Some people mistakenly think you need an ultra-detailed world to start DM'ing. This is something the DMG and the like should probably address.

2) Some people who like detailed worlds are ALSO people who are extremely protective of those worlds, and who want to provide more of a "guided tour" than a typical adventure, and use the effort they put in as an excuse for limiting player agency.

Those are real problems, but some guy writing up the mayor's favourite colour in town of Nevervisit isn't causing a problem unless it's going to lead to #2. If anything, a DM who details stuff which might well _never_ get used is probably less likely to engage in #2 than a DM who obsessively details stuff which _probably__ will_ get used.


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## Nikosandros (Jul 2, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> Umm...yes? I mean, you can say the same thing about a lot of stuff: color, your existence as a distinct entity, etc.
> 
> However, I was responding to the challenge of "finding root -1" in nature. In the respect you are bringing up, that's no different than finding 4 in nature, except perhaps in the degree of effort needed to notice it.



Leaving philosophical questions about abstract and concrete objects aside, I think that we actually agree.


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## TwoSix (Jul 2, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> You know perfectly well that they're pejoratives, come off it!




There's the rub, then.    To my mind, they're quite mild.  



> I think you're moving the goalposts here, because you were initially complaining about DMs who spent "too much" time detailing the world and suggesting it was a masturbatory activity, and now you're claiming something quite different, which is that it is a "harmful stereotype", and that it's okay to not have a deep, defined world.
> 
> That doesn't really seem to be the same argument.



I wasn't really aiming to be argumentative, I was honestly just feeling somewhat puckish yesterday and went for a little jab.  Getting called out as patronizing (not by you, I know) was the only reason I made any sort of rebuttal.  



> Further, you've conflated enjoying detailing stuff for one's own pleasure (ahem!) with being a sort of obsessively overprepared ultra-detailer and making everything think it has to be that way, and I don't think it's fair to conflate these things. Nor fair to blame someone who enjoys making detailed settings for "promoting a harmful stereotype". It's not his or her fault that this stereotype exists, and he or she shouldn't have to change their activities because of it.



I don't view it as conflation, although, to be fair, I wasn't really parsing my posts very well, so it's very possible any point I made was muddled.  I just think out of those DMs whose pastime is working on detailed write-ups of their setting, there are a subset (only a subset!) who do it to run games to show off their world-building skills.

While I have no issue with whatever people want to do in their off time, my personal belief is that there's a very poor rate of return on time invested in the setting compared to enjoyment at the table.  Quite simply, I don't think detailed games make playing any more fun.  Now, this is certainly a broad brush view, I know there are people for whom the exploration of a fantastically detailed world is the main draw of play.  



> It all just seems really like a bad approach to some real issues, one that makes people feel bad and demonised, whilst not actually solving anything or helping anyone. Calling people wankers for liking to detail stuff doesn't encourage people to realize that less-detailed worlds can work well, does it? In fact I feel it's likely to entrench and inflame opinions on the subject, if anything.



I don't want them to feel bad, because they shouldn't feel bad.  Everyone has my explicit permission to waste as much of their time as they want.  Hell, just posting on this message board by myself pretty much makes me a forum-wanker, after all.   I just think that many of the people who engage in the practice may be mistaken if they think it's making their game that much better.  Again, not all, just many.



> The real problems here, as far as I can see are:
> 
> 1) Some people mistakenly think you need an ultra-detailed world to start DM'ing. This is something the DMG and the like should probably address.
> 
> ...



We are in total agreement as to what the problems are, and who perpetrates them.


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## Hussar (Jul 2, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> I used to be a physicist and...that's not what physicists do, IME. As a species, they tend to be very tentative about declaring something real. At best, when referring to mathematical abstractions in physical models, most physicists would refer to their "reality" as irrelevant (barring evidence to the contrary). I mean, I've even had discussions about whether or not electrons are "real".
> 
> TBH, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], your paragraph sounds like " disgruntled studentism".
> 
> On the other hand, I agree with the general point that HP are hopelessly non-simulatory. In general, I find the whole Sim crowd a little incoherent. That is, physical worlds and laws cannot be used to simulate plot driven (or at least "plot aware") fantasy stories. The resistance to "meta" mechanics (and refusal to accept that HP are one) totally baffle me. It seems to me that the entire effort must be driven by other psychological motivations which remain unclear to me. (At least within the framework of DnD.)




Oh, sorry, I certainly did not meant to imply or state that all physicists do this all the time.  It's certainly not true.  But, when you start getting into some of the more esoteric ends of quantum physics and whatnot, it does apparently happen.

-----

On the incoherence bit, I tend to be a bit cynical to be honest.  The argument is never, "I want sim games, so, I use the best tools to get what I want."  It's almost always, "Well, I consider myself to be a sim player, and when I played my favourite edition, I enjoyed the experience.  When I played _your_ edition, I didn't enjoy it, therefore, your game must not be sim."

It's quite simply tribalism and a means to try to exclude 4e and 4e fans from the game.  You see it all the time.  "Every edition before 4e let me do X, and 4e didn't, so...."  The only problem is, when you scratch beneath the surface, and not very far usually, most of the time the "every edition" or "players like me" or "everyone did this back then" tends to be pretty idiosyncratic and limited to one table's experience and mostly unsupported by anything actually in the text of the game.


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## Nagol (Jul 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Oh, sorry, I certainly did not meant to imply or state that all physicists do this all the time.  It's certainly not true.  But, when you start getting into some of the more esoteric ends of quantum physics and whatnot, it does apparently happen.




And sometimes the physicists are right!  After all, quarks were initially a abstract convenience -- until they were proven real.


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## Sadras (Jul 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> In my view there can be no hard-and-fast rules here, because different players have different degrees of tolerance for GM surprises, and different degrees of desire to have the GM pick up on their backstory and run with it. That said, I wouldn't want to run a game in which every player is a turtle who retreats into his/her shell at the merest hint of GM playing with backstory. That doesn't sound like very much fun to me.




That sounds fair, one has to read/know ones players. As DM I always allow players to come up with their own character backgrounds or if they don't want to they usually let me DM draw up something as the campaign progresses. As a personal preference if I were a player I'm pretty relaxed, so if the DM suddenly introduced the deva backstory your player had without consulting me, I wouldn't care, it is was a great idea. Kinda like surprises in RPGs.

Will respond to the rest later, have to pick up the wife!


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'd rather model that directly by the monsters getting tougher over time (in the fiction) to match the PCs, rather than saying it's the same monster but I changed the stats so he's still a challenge.  Although I'm reading my own sentence and I don't think I'm explaining myself well.



Maybe I've misunderstood you - but what you're talking about here doesn't seem related to the whole solo > elite > standard > minion > swarm progression.

The point of restatting a monster as a minion of 8 or so levels higher is to hold the toughness constant in the fiction (ie the monster has not changed in its objective capabilties) but make the mechanical handling smoother, and hence to facilitate the PCs dealing with larger numbers of such creatures without having to track hit point totals for dozens of creatures, without most of their attacks being ineffective misses, etc.

I gave a worked example upthread.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 2, 2014)

I super suck with numbers (discalculia) so no, I didn't notice at first. Husband told me a few things were broken, but those never came up in our games. 

But once, forgot what detail it was, but 8it had to do with combat, I had a big *wait a minute* moment. And that's when I started houseruling some stuff


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> It all just seems really like a bad approach to some real issues, one that makes people feel bad and demonised, whilst not actually solving anything or helping anyone. Calling people wankers for liking to detail stuff doesn't encourage people to realize that less-detailed worlds can work well, does it? In fact I feel it's likely to entrench and inflame opinions on the subject, if anything.
> 
> The real problems here, as far as I can see are <snip>



Speaking just for myself, a recurring problem that I have seen on these boards is an assumption that detailed world prep is the only alternative to brainless hack-and-slash.

I also agree with [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] that there is often an assumption that more world prep will lead to a better play experience, whereas I personally have virtually no reason to believe that that is so. (Now thinking about how to sting and prod your players via their PCs - that will probably improve your play experience.)


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## Umbran (Jul 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right?  It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.




And the physicist uses _i_, all the time.  It is integral (pun intended) to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

However, when we end up with a result that says something is 5_i_ meters long, we know we've probably screwed up somewhere.  We even have a term for such things - "non-physical result".

Part of what you're talking about is a simple fact of human cognition.  We humans don't actually *think* in mathematics very well.  Unless you're Stephen Hawking, you don't generally do partial differentials or matrix calculus in your head.  Taking the math, interpreting it as a physical result, as if it were real, allows us to apply more intuition in a thought process.  

And, to speak about some of the results to laymen, it is pretty much required, because laymen just don't have the math.

But, in the end, we re talking about two fundamentally different processes here:

A physicist looks at the real world, makes a mathematical model of it, and sees what comes out - we start with reality, so it isn't so weird that we then try to relate the math back to reality.

A gamer is looking at a math, accepting that it is a model of a world, and trying to infer the world from it.  The problem is that a gamer is not often starting from a well-defined "reality" to start with.  Sometimes (say, with a game designed to model a specific work of fiction) there's a "reality" to refer to, but we lose that when the system is more generic.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Maybe I've misunderstood you - but what you're talking about here doesn't seem related to the whole solo > elite > standard > minion > swarm progression.
> 
> The point of restatting a monster as a minion of 8 or so levels higher is to hold the toughness constant in the fiction (ie the monster has not changed in its objective capabilties) but make the mechanical handling smoother, and hence to facilitate the PCs dealing with larger numbers of such creatures without having to track hit point totals for dozens of creatures, without most of their attacks being ineffective misses, etc.
> 
> I gave a worked example upthread.




My response was to a poster who seemed to think it wasn't about holding the toughness constant, so I addressed his concept.

I understand what the "minion" rule is supposed to simulate - I'm just explaining how I find that monster capabilities that change based solely on my current power level takes me out of the fiction.  That's just my perception.

The point of the debate overall is whether one version of the game is superior in its portrayal of "hit points" and what they mean or don't mean.  One person described a scenario where his characters would slaughter their way through mooks that used to be almost too tough to fight - and where I would have portrayed this by having the monsters remain constant but the PCs improve, he used the 4e model, and felt that this made his story more "awesome" if I remember.  And I disagreed that it would have made the story more awesome _for me_.

The minion rule was a clever idea to address an obvious-in-hindsight problem with 3e, and many people like it.  But for some people it breaks verisimilitude.  And I think 5e's attempt at flatter math may prove (fingers crossed) to be a functional solution.


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## pemerton (Jul 2, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> My response was to a poster who seemed to think it wasn't about holding the toughness constant, so I addressed his concept.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> One person described a scenario where his characters would slaughter their way through mooks that used to be almost too tough to fight



Unless I badly understood the posts in question, [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] _was_ holding the toughness of the monsters constants as the PCs in the game gained levels. But that constant toughness was mechanically realised in changing ways - solo to elite to minion.



Savage Wombat said:


> The point of the debate overall is whether one version of the game is superior in its portrayal of "hit points" and what they mean or don't mean.



From my point of view the debate has a different point. Some posters are asserting that minion rules - or, more generally, multiple mechanical realisations of a constant gameworld element - make the gameworld inconsistent.

This implies that the gameworld in my game is inconsistent. I'm contesting that implication. My gameworld is consistent, and this consistency is not harmed by the fact that, at various times, fictionally identical hobgolin warriors have been mechanically realised as standard monsters, or as minions, or subsumed into the swarms which are their phalanxes.


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## Hussar (Jul 2, 2014)

Note, also, restatting isn't new to DnD. I used to use Battlesystems quite a lot back in the day and you had to convert units all the time. Your PC was mechanically quite different when using this system. 

Maybe that's why this doesn't bother me. Changing the stats to suit a new situation just seems like a good idea if it works better. 

Kind of like the idea of treating large groups as mobs in 3e. Or treating something like a warship as a single entity. Or combining stats for mounted units. 

To me, this is nothing new.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 2, 2014)

Nikosandros said:


> Leaving philosophical questions about abstract and concrete objects aside, I think that we actually agree.



Well good 'cause so do I.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 2, 2014)

Nagol said:


> And sometimes the physicists are right!  After all, quarks were initially a abstract convenience -- until they were proven real.



Oh sure. Lots of different things in physics start out as accounting tricks and then end meaning much more. That's one of the things that keeps you up at night: "Why does this all keep working?" OTOH, finding the places where it doesn't currently work...and finding the math to make it work...is ripe territory for good physics.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 3, 2014)

Nagol said:


> The description above covers two different tools I use.




Thanks for the post.  What you depict below is very akin to the formalized advice/process for creating and handling the evolution of _fronts _in Dungeon World.  What you've described is very familiar to me.  It is, as you put it, pretty much in the middle.  I've run games on both ends of the spectrum and areas in between.  My current GMing best practices does push play towards low resolution setting backstory at the outset ("lots of blanks") and just enough calibrated PC backstory such that all of those setting blanks can be filled in during play (by our play) and the trajectory of the "story" is established alongside it through deft GMing (provoking players' thematic material that they have embedded within their characters) and player investment in the conflicts to be resolved. 

I've found over the years that if I demand myself to be spontaneous and improvisational, I will deliver the goods and enjoy the experience more than if I prepped meticulously.  Further, I've found that if I leave enough spaces/blanks for my players to fill, and demand the same level of creativity, they will deliver the goods coherently (from a genre perspective and an internal consistency perspective).  In contrast, I've found that as the shared imaginary space is contracted (due to less blanks/higher resolution setting/rigid adherence to established canon), operant conditioning takes hold and players constantly look to me to vet their creative impulses.  That is not what I want from me, not what I want from them, and not what I want out of our play.  

I know you (and others) have had reservations about an abstraction: player agency infringement correlation.  There is, of course, a natural arrestment of the causal logic chain for real life actors as information is lost.  However, RPG players naturally function in a low resolution environment where sensory and spatial information is fundamentally retarded with respect to real life.  Regardless of how well the GM conveys "the dynamics on the ground", there will be an inescapable perspective dissonance from player to GM and from player to player.   Each player must assimilate what the GM has conveyed, what other players have conveyed, the context for that information, along with the required in-fill of their own, unique perception bias.  Understanding that reality, playing with tools that zoom out a bit in response to that (broad descriptor resources and conflict resolution), heady GMing/attentive playing, and synchronicity on genre conceits has served to protect against any player agency infringement because of abstraction.

The above also applies to the exchange that Sadras[/mention and  pemerton are having.


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## Hussar (Jul 3, 2014)

Lwaxy said:


> I super suck with numbers (discalculia) so no, I didn't notice at first. Husband told me a few things were broken, but those never came up in our games.
> 
> But once, forgot what detail it was, but 8it had to do with combat, I had a big *wait a minute* moment. And that's when I started houseruling some stuff




I do not mean this as a dig at all.  But, this is where I generally see problems in games.  The intersection between "I super suck with numbers" and "I started house ruling".  Because this sometimes has some really nasty effects on gameplay.  I'm not saying this is what happened to you Lwaxy.  Again, this isn't meant as a shot of any kind.  Just an observation.

IME, many of the times when people start talking about how this or that rule is broken, there's a fair number of times the brokenness is due to user error rather than the math behind it.  This is one of the things I really appreciate about WOTC D&D, either 3rd or 4th edition.  The math is accurate more times than it isn't.  Being able to trust the mechanics and not having to constantly audit the books is a major plus in my books.


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## Emerikol (Jul 3, 2014)

I think there are any number of ways to play D&D successfully.  For my playstyle and yes this time I mean it in the broadest sense, detailed preparation adds to the play experience.  

I'm not though a railroading DM.  I run sandbox campaigns almost exclusively these days.  My players totally drive the action.  By having a detailed world with lots of opportunities for adventure allows my players the freedom to do whatever they want.   The world keeps moving around them too.  

So I don't believe one implies the other.  Detailed DMs are just detailed.  I'm sure beyond that they can be any other type of DM.  

As for setting unfair expectations for new DMs, I find DMs inclined to run my style of game start out using prepackaged worlds and sandbox adventures.  Once they see how its done they start doing their own.  It's not hard so much as time consuming.  It does take some creativity of course but really no more than other types of DMs.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 3, 2014)

​


Hussar said:


> IME, many of the times when people start talking about how this or that rule is broken, there's a fair number of times the brokenness is due to user error rather than the math behind it.  This is one of the things I really appreciate about WOTC D&D, either 3rd or 4th edition.  The math is accurate more times than it isn't.  Being able to trust the mechanics and not having to constantly audit the books is a major plus in my books.




I knew a guy back in 1e with an incredibly broken barbarian character.  Turns out the "broken" part was the "DM never audited the character sheet" and hadn't seen that the guy screwed up the math calculating his AC bonus.  He was not happy when I pointed this out.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jul 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Unless I badly understood the posts in question, [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] _was_ holding the toughness of the monsters constants as the PCs in the game gained levels. But that constant toughness was mechanically realised in changing ways - solo to elite to minion.




well what I was trying to show was that I used 4e mechanics (in the past I used 2e, 3e, 3.5 Wod, Rifts, Shadowrun, and other mechanics) to make a fun game that was internally consistent. 

The first few times they ran into these guys they were hard to hit and had a bunch of powers... they hit hard and were very deadly.

The next few times they ran into them they still were tough, but the didn't hit hard enough to be too hard, and the fights were a little faster

the final time they ran through hundreds of them because 'in game' they got better and they they upgraded and they learned how to fight them...


See I could write a good tv show with what happened (well one with a downer ending... I mean like 95% TPK and the world all but destroyed)

I could also make a good story with out the minion rules...but I made THIS story with them...


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## Emerikol (Jul 3, 2014)

For the record I personally do not like a game that is relative to the players instead of some objective standard.  So I'd want the same ogre to always have the same stat block regardless of PC level.

Just my pref.


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## Lanefan (Jul 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The "necessity" arises from the desire to have smooth and engaging gameplay. It's the same reason that most people, if they want to run a combat of 100 vs 100, will look for mechanical tooset other than core D&D combat. (I gather 5e is going to come with such a Battlesystem built in.)
> 
> As to "destructive to internal consistency", how so? What internal consistency has been destroyed? If the toughness of the ogre, or giant, or whatever, is constant, where is the destruction? Heck, I've preserved internal consistency of gameworlds across _changes in system_ eg from D&D to Rolemaster.



Preserving true consistency across a system change can't have been easy.  I went through this as a player - a game I'd been in for quite some time changed from 3e to 3.5e on the fly with the pre-warned knowledge that consistency was going to suffer.  And it did.

Within the same system, a creature's toughness is in part measured and-or defined by its hit points; and if those and other elements of its makeup change arbitrarily (rules-based, not DM-based) based on what it's facing that's not very consistent.  

Lan-"of course,  if it was a DM-based change people would be screaming blue murder"-efan


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## Lanefan (Jul 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I also agree with [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] that there is often an assumption that more world prep will lead to a better play experience,



Which, in my own experience, is a very valid assumption that I will happily continue to make: if all other things are equal, a well-prepped world will give a better game than an unprepped one.  For much the same reason, a homebrew setting will (usually) give a better game than a canned setting, because the DM has invested her own imagination into it rather than simply reading and assimilating the imaginations of others.

It's not that simple to present a deep rich setting for your players to bash around in without first presenting it to yourself during design.

Lan-"and of course, as with anything, taking world design to extremes leads to quickly diminishing returns"-efan


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## pemerton (Jul 3, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Within the same system, a creature's toughness is in part measured and-or defined by its hit points



But it is not defined solely by its hit points. In 4e, in particular, it is defined also by its level, which determine attack bonus, defences and damage.

Hence the fact that toughness can be held constant while the factors that contribute to it are re-arranged.


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## Pickles JG (Jul 3, 2014)

Lanefan said:


> Which, in my own experience, is a very valid assumption that I will happily continue to make: if all other things are equal, a well-prepped world will give a better game than an unprepped one.  For much the same reason, a homebrew setting will (usually) give a better game than a canned setting, because the DM has invested her own imagination into it rather than simply reading and assimilating the imaginations of others.
> 
> It's not that simple to present a deep rich setting for your players to bash around in without first presenting it to yourself during design.
> 
> Lan-"and of course, as with anything, taking world design to extremes leads to quickly diminishing returns"-efan




While I expect tbis is true for well prepared homebrew it  not the case for poorly fleshed out settings or ones in which the DM does a poor job of communicating it. It's why I like playing in the Realms say as there is a lot of shared background that can colour the game. I also feel that a lot of back story is for DM's rather than player's benefits, though that's their perogative to write (but the Onan references do spring unbidden to mind)

There is an issue with communicating background without massive exposition dumps. For myself I appreciate fluff but as a rule dislike reading it. How do you communicate details of a homebrew setting to the players? Hmm could be another topic


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## Nagol (Jul 3, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> Thanks for the post.  What you depict below is very akin to the formalized advice/process for creating and handling the evolution of _fronts _in Dungeon World.  What you've described is very familiar to me.  It is, as you put it, pretty much in the middle.  I've run games on both ends of the spectrum and areas in between.  My current GMing best practices does push play towards low resolution setting backstory at the outset ("lots of blanks") and just enough calibrated PC backstory such that all of those setting blanks can be filled in during play (by our play) and the trajectory of the "story" is established alongside it through deft GMing (provoking players' thematic material that they have embedded within their characters) and player investment in the conflicts to be resolved.
> 
> I've found over the years that if I demand myself to be spontaneous and improvisational, I will deliver the goods and enjoy the experience more than if I prepped meticulously.  Further, I've found that if I leave enough spaces/blanks for my players to fill, and demand the same level of creativity, they will deliver the goods coherently (from a genre perspective and an internal consistency perspective).  In contrast, I've found that as the shared imaginary space is contracted (due to less blanks/higher resolution setting/rigid adherence to established canon), operant conditioning takes hold and players constantly look to me to vet their creative impulses.  That is not what I want from me, not what I want from them, and not what I want out of our play.
> 
> ...




I have no idea what "player agency infringement correlation" is -- player agency correlated against what and how is it an abstraction?

My style is pretty improvisational as well -- sandboxes by their nature need to be I think.  The wider the choices available to the players, the more improvisation is necessary.  The tools guide me as to what the players will find the next time they turn their attention somewhere and what is information is available in their environment.  The tools I described help deal with the necessarily restricted information flow to the players by providing post-hoc justification for coincidence and in-game occurrences of a type directly perceived by the players.

Don't mistake my preference as a player (actor stance only, no actions dictated by me that do not have a corresponding decision point for the character) with my DMing style.  I'm happy with a collaborative approach and player input into the campaign -- more than my players are, it seems.  I enjoy running games like FATE or My Life with Master where the players have a much stronger voice about how situations unfold, have added player agency via Lion Rampant's  _Whimsy Cards_ (a randomised player meta-game asset) to a variety of games, player world-building is encouraged and most campaigns have a standing offer for anyone to DM any situation with the only restriction being it can't directly contradict current table understanding (my current Conspiracy-X campaign doesn't have this offer since the players don't have sufficient knowledge as to how the world works at this point; once they work out the rules and relationships it'll open up again).


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## Quartz (Jul 3, 2014)

I'm late to the party so I'm responding to some of the early posts...

3E imbalance was recognisable as a possible problem out of the gate. But really CoDzilla etc are only problems if you allow players to get away with nova. Sure the cleric can cast a spell or two to become a better fighter than the fighter, but the cleric can only do it once or twice a day. And when they do nova, hit them with a _Dispel Magic_ or _Disjunction_; play the enemy spellcasters intelligently (and maybe it's the enemy rogue who's using a Ring of Spell Storing or using her UMD skill). And enemies don't sit still; they will harry the PCs. Enemies will act as their intelligence directs. Also, give players downtime to create magic items, especially scrolls of less-used spells (the 4E concept of rituals for such seems a very useful alternative). Expect spellcasters to be a level or two behind non-spellcasters. Encourage the use of XP-burning spells like _Permanency_, and _Wish_.

And then there's multiclassing...


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## Manbearcat (Jul 3, 2014)

Nagol said:


> I have no idea what "player agency infringement correlation" is -- player agency correlated against what and how is it an abstraction?




As abstraction increases, player agency decreases.  The assumption being that abstraction or information of a lower resolution inevitably leads to an erosion of player-side (strategic and/or tactical) decisions being driven by causal logic.  For example, TotM battle when you're an MU and you think folks are in one place but the GM tells you that you're slightly mistaken when you deploy AoE.  Obviously a grid with tangible representations of actors/terrain features is less abstract.  There are other examples that folks have taken issue with;  elements of noncombat conflict resolution (various shrodinger elements - such as the gorge) being zoomed out and then firmed up/established as play progresses.

As for the rest of your post, that makes sense.  I think our GMing preferences/principles are probably quite similar.  I don't have any preferences as a player so I can't speak to that.  I guess I can just say that it makes sense that you wouldn't like 4e (nor the way I run it) as a player!


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## Nagol (Jul 3, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> As abstraction increases, player agency decreases.  The assumption being that abstraction or information of a lower resolution inevitably leads to an erosion of player-side (strategic and/or tactical) decisions being driven by causal logic.  For example, TotM battle when you're an MU and you think folks are in one place but the GM tells you that you're slightly mistaken when you deploy AoE.  Obviously a grid with tangible representations of actors/terrain features is less abstract.  There are other examples that folks have taken issue with;  elements of noncombat conflict resolution (various shrodinger elements - such as the gorge) being zoomed out and then firmed up/established as play progresses.
> 
> As for the rest of your post, that makes sense.  I think our GMing preferences/principles are probably quite similar.  I don't have any preferences as a player so I can't speak to that.  I guess I can just say that it makes sense that you wouldn't like 4e (nor the way I run it) as a player!




I don't think abstraction reduces player agency.  Uncertainty certainly does.

A player has at least as much agency if the whole affair is hand-waved as he would have with in-depth resolution.  "I want to establish a keep here" is as effective if the answer is "OK.  Six months later, the keep is complete, but unfurnished." or "OK.  Step 1 is pick your hex... OK not that the keep is fully established, step 971 is to purchase furnishings".

What destroys player agency is uncertainty / shifting ground.  Shifting ground can be used as a tactic for illusionism, after all.

The gorge can be problematic to a variety of play styles.  (For those just tuning in, "the gorge" is shorthand for a check failure in a skill challenge resulting in the PC looking out over a gorge that previously did not exist in the area)

Player agency is harmed because the player cannot predict/mitigate the dangers of running into such a device.  At that point the terrain surrounding the PCs becomes set dressing and effectively nothing the character can rely on.  Uncertainty rises.

The same problem results from grid-less combat.  The player's positional uncertainty or another person shifting the ground undercuts agency if the game engine insists on that level of detail.  But if the game engine is focused at a more abstract positioning (say _Strands of Fate_ where action areas are carved into zones but actual positioning doesn't matter) agency isn't undercut.


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## Obryn (Jul 3, 2014)

I'd say it reduces player fiat, however, which is an element of agency.


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## Nagol (Jul 3, 2014)

Obryn said:


> I'd say it reduces player fiat, however, which is an element of agency.




Really?  I would think abstraction generally increases player declaration chances.  The more granular the resolution process, the more points of failure and the harder the player has to struggle to change circumstance.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 3, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I do not mean this as a dig at all.  But, this is where I generally see problems in games.  The intersection between "I super suck with numbers" and "I started house ruling".  Because this sometimes has some really nasty effects on gameplay.  I'm not saying this is what happened to you Lwaxy.  Again, this isn't meant as a shot of any kind.  Just an observation.
> 
> IME, many of the times when people start talking about how this or that rule is broken, there's a fair number of times the brokenness is due to user error rather than the math behind it.  This is one of the things I really appreciate about WOTC D&D, either 3rd or 4th edition.  The math is accurate more times than it isn't.  Being able to trust the mechanics and not having to constantly audit the books is a major plus in my books.




My husband is super good with numbers. If he says something is broken when played out to its fullest possibilities, then it likely is. 

Wish I could remember what made me start adapting rules first place, however most of our changes have less to do with numbers but other stuff like elves needing sleep like everyone else (well, not quite like everyone else) and intelligent undead and constructs being hit by most mind affecting stuff like everyone else. Arcane healing. And a new magic system. And... well I guess it is mostly flavor.


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## Hussar (Jul 3, 2014)

Nagol said:


> Really?  I would think abstraction generally increases player declaration chances.  The more granular the resolution process, the more points of failure and the harder the player has to struggle to change circumstance.




I see what you're saying here and I do kinda agree.  But, the assumption here is that the DM is a totally neutral observer and I don't think that can ever be true.  One of the roles of a DM is to provide challenge for the PC's.  When there is ambiguity, the DM could choose the less advantageous interpretation, simply out of a desire to provide challenge for the PC's.  And, I think there is a very strong temptation to do so.  If there is a chance that the fireball will catch the fighter, I think DM's are incentivised to include the fighter in the area of effect in order to provide a greater degree of challenge.


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## Lanefan (Jul 4, 2014)

Pickles JG said:


> There is an issue with communicating background without massive exposition dumps. For myself I appreciate fluff but as a rule dislike reading it. How do you communicate details of a homebrew setting to the players? Hmm could be another topic



What I do is prepare a high-level one-pager for the campaign's start, and a map of course, then slowly* release more information as it is discovered during play.  The pantheons and cultures are also fleshed out a bit up front so people can know what's available and what to expect before they start rolling up characters.

* - sometimes in big batches 

Lanefan


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## Der-Rage (Jul 4, 2014)

Pickles JG said:


> There is an issue with communicating background without massive exposition dumps. For myself I appreciate fluff but as a rule dislike reading it. How do you communicate details of a homebrew setting to the players? Hmm could be another topic



Generally speaking, I've found it's best to communicate the immediately pertinent information about the place the PCs currently are as needed, and leave more fleshed out details for say, an Obsidian Portal wiki. That way if your players are unclear or want to know more, they can check that, but you're not dumping a bunch of info on them in game. Generally your players won't mind if you flesh the world out for your own sake as long as you're doing it to make their experience better and not just to stroke your own erogenous zones.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 5, 2014)

Nagol said:


> I don't think abstraction reduces player agency.  Uncertainty certainly does.
> 
> A player has at least as much agency if the whole affair is hand-waved as he would have with in-depth resolution.  "I want to establish a keep here" is as effective if the answer is "OK.  Six months later, the keep is complete, but unfurnished." or "OK.  Step 1 is pick your hex... OK not that the keep is fully established, step 971 is to purchase furnishings".
> 
> ...




I outlined that particular Skill Challenge in extreme detail about 1.25 years ago here and in the posts surrounding it.  Rather than run that down again, I think I'm going to work my way through this using Dungeon World's Undertake a Perilous Journey (which maps precisely to the situation in question with the 4e Skill Challenge mechanics), the GM principles/best practices, and the system components for action declaration and resource deployment that delivers agency to the players.

Undertake a Perilous Journey in Dungeon World is a move that exists (1) when the players are moving through hostile territory and (2) when the PCs know where they are going.  So whenever dangers/threats can/should become manifest and when the PCs have either traversed this trek before or they have clear means to divine their way from point A to point B.  

When this happens, 3 prescriptive roles (trailblazer, quartermaster, and scout) each role a singular check to determine success for the entirety of the journey.  On a 10 + the job is performed very well and a relevant boon is earned (eg the scout would spot trouble quick enough to let you get the drop on it.  On a 7-9, the job takes the normal amount of time and neither side gets the drop on each other if the prospect of an encounter comes up (because of the following).  On a 6 or less, a complication is "earned" whereby the GM should be framing the PCs into adversity with respect to the job that "earned" the failure (and the PC marks xp).

So what is the agency that the PCs have here?  They get to pick who does what jobs, deploy any resources that will successfully (if that is what they wish) facilitate the conflict resolution of that specific job (such as divination fiat moves, perilous journey fiat moves, hirelings, moves that mitigate ration consumption or moves that take general or specific + 1 forward), and then they get to roll their 2d6 + n.  

GMing principles sets out that you should have a low resolution maps whereby blanks are fleshed out in the course of play.  So let us say that the PCs have something specific that provides them the means to get from point A to point B.  Perhaps they have quickly journeyed through the vast, broken landscape one time before or perhaps they have a map or some kind of divining rod-like item.  If they're just setting out to explore the wild, without explicit means to get from A to B (perhaps to try to find a specific place after you have set out), then you're not going to use Undertake a Perilous Journey.  You're just going to let the fiction guide you and let moves follow moves until things unfurl themselves.

So let us say that the PCs need to go through these dizzying badlands to get to this specific place.  Relative to the terrain, they don't have enough info or experience to make it a point A to point B scenario.  They know "what they're looking for" (let us say a temple to Zehir near an oasis) but they possess little to no familiarity with the region/geography.  So we're going to play it out.  It isn't a situation where you would deploy Undertake a Perilous Journey move.  On the way through the hostile terrain, they commit to the deployment of resources which expedite travel pace and stealthiness.  They have 0 prospects for the Supply and Recover moves out here.  The best they can do is the Camp and Take Watch.  That means consumption of supplies and prospects for dangerous, resource depleting conflicts (hard moves by the GM on a 6 or less).  In 4e, this would be not wanting to risk a mass loss of aggregate daily resource loss (Powers and Healing Surges) with no prospects for an Extended Rest until the mission is accomplished.  So they deploy moves and spend resources which ablate their resources but they allow them to reduce total exposure.

The terrain is described to them in the low resolution detail required to facilitate fiction first play and to immediately resolve action declaration.  They aren't going to have a perfect map of the territory on the way back.  However, significant success in action declaration related to terrain navigation may earn them currency (such as Hold or a + 2 on a relevant Nature or Perception check on the way back in a 4e SC) to spend on the way back (on a related check).  That is another aspect of agency.

On the way back we're going to Undertake a Perilous Journey.  It is hostile territory, but the PCs have enough grip (even if just having traversed it once) on the region to attempt to navigate a point A to point B scenario.  On the way back, the trailblazer triggers a major complication on a 6 or less roll (and they mark xp).  As a GM, its my job to make a hard move against them that properly reflects the implications of a failure in this action declaration.  A trailblazer guiding the group might earn them a complication by mistakenly wandering into a major threat (such as a hazard or a monstrous lair) or by improperly reading the trail signs and making a navigation error.  The former might manifest as a sudden collapse sinkhole, lightning sand, or the territoy or an alpha predator; perhaps Ankheg or Bulette.  Perhaps if a chase scenario has evolved, the latter may manifest as one of the many (or few) nigh-impassible gorges that scar the land.

Now let us rewind a bit.  Let us say that along the way there, the PCs actually made an action declaration that involved mapping the area and specifically trying to avoid the gorge(s) that scar(s) the area so the scenario above doesn't happen.  Great.  Declare the action and lets resolve it mechanically. The fiction/subsequent moves by me would follow from the results of their move/action declaration.  In Dungeon World (as in 4e), if they are successful in their move, then I'm not going to complicate their lives with "gorge adversity" in the future on a failed navigation check.  However, if they roll a 6 or less, its my job to complicate their lives with related adversity.  I don't have to do it immediately, but I need to do it.  Perhaps I would put that in my back pocket for later deployment when the moment is right.  The moment is definitely right in the case of a desperate chase when they're trying to get out of the treacherous badlands and the last thing they want is to be cornered due to their earned navigation blunder.

Anyway, that is the way agency takes shape in Dungeon World and 4e exploration (via Undertake a Perilous Journey and Skill Challenges).


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