The existence of bad choices is not necessary to make choices interesting when it comes to building a character - after all, all you are deciding is how you are going to interact with the actual game. Why not focus system mastery on actual play rather than on building your piece? Mekton Zeta has a tagline that stuck with me: "Death on the drawing board". In the vast majority of roleplaying games how you build your character is far more important than how well you play them, and given that you build a character for a few hours at best and play the character for years that seems backwards.
I couldn't agree more.
Introduction of bad (or even sub-optimal) choices does not make the optimal choices interesting. it just makes them not suck. Hiding the bad choices among the good in a puzzle of character creation might seem interesting to some, but the player whose interest is in playing and not in character generation is unlikely to think so. It does make sense that people would find generation interesting--males especially respond strongly and positively to elements of system mastery in games.
The alternative is to create options (as mentioned) that are all relatively close in effectiveness under general conditions with situational bonuses. Having those bonuses grant SMALL synergies with the character's other options or those of other players is nice, as well. Keeping them small allows for the designer to include more synergistic choices without either forcing them on players, requiring large compensations throughout the system, or having to limit choices.
Leper on
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
Heh, Here is an interesting sentence that I pulled from a negative review of WoW Mists of Pandaria on Amazon.
The talent system is a joke now. You can close your eyes, pick random talents, and end up with a viable character.
As dumb as that is, I can see where he is coming from.
But even if you want system mastery to be part of character creation, how do you do that if the internet exists and people can just copy the good builds.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I get that some people want there to be "bad choices."
The problem with that (esp. in a table-top RPG) is that these choices are tied to concepts that the players will choose to define the character they will play.
Whether they choose the option because it fits the concept in their head, or alter the concept to fit the option they find to be interesting, bad choices still make someone's idea of "cool" to be "shit" in a mechanical sense. While far less misanthropic and severe, it's the equivalent of telling your players "if you want to make concept X and actually be a hero, because your imagination says that's not just possible but desirable, then your imagination is wrong."
When we're talking about a game that is ostensibly a game of cooperative imagination, outright declaring someone to be "wrong" before even beginning play is what I'd call a fundamental failure of your design process.
Leper on
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
Heh, Here is an interesting sentence that I pulled from a negative review of WoW Mists of Pandaria on Amazon.
The talent system is a joke now. You can close your eyes, pick random talents, and end up with a viable character.
As dumb as that is, I can see where he is coming from.
But even if you want system mastery to be part of character creation, how do you do that if the internet exists and people can just copy the good builds.
Right. Especially for MMORPGs, those are a bad kind of customer because part of their enjoyment over your game is (apparently) derived from having something over the "unviable" characters, be it just general sense of being better, some kind of exploit, being the "elite" who can finish the too hard quests, whatever. For games where you want everyone buying all of your product, continuously, that is a bad customer to cater to. You want everyone building viable characters.
Hell, for 4e, I'd say that unless you were being intentionally malicious to yourself in chargen, you can take any combination of decisions ("randomly") and have something that is at least "viable". 4e by no means got universal internal balance completely right, but it was probably the closest of D&D, and a solid rejection of 3e style system mastery. I'd hoped that all of the same complaints about 4e (whether or not true) prompted the developers to say "Yes, we are doing something right. Print all the balance!" As is the theme of this thread, apparently the masters of 5e learned nothing from 4e's successes.
And, indeed, once a forum for chargen builds exists, the entire mastery canard is pretty much a joke. At worst, it becomes the only way to make a character, which probably means as a consequence that your devs wasted a bunch of time and money on the suboptimal things that no one picks anymore because the community bias is that they are "wrong" or "traps" or whatever. 4e has traps (poor Linguist, it is getting battered in this thread), but not really all that many.
bss on
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AnialosCollies are love, Collies are life!Shadowbrook ColliesRegistered Userregular
I like making good characters that do their thing well. Min-maxing has no place in my tabletop RPGing outside of Lair Assault though. If you bring some broken monstrosity to the table as a player when I'm DMing, please be prepared to face my horribly over powered monster you somehow found yourself locked in a cage with.
I get that some people want there to be "bad choices."
The problem with that (esp. in a table-top RPG) is that these choices are tied to concepts that the players will choose to define the character they will play.
Whether they choose the option because it fits the concept in their head, or alter the concept to fit the option they find to be interesting, bad choices still make someone's idea of "cool" to be "shit" in a mechanical sense. While far less misanthropic and severe, it's the equivalent of telling your players "if you want to make concept X and actually be a hero, because your imagination says that's not just possible but desirable, then your imagination is wrong."
When we're talking about a game that is ostensibly a game of cooperative imagination, outright declaring someone to be "wrong" before even beginning play is what I'd call a fundamental failure of your design process.
Okay, let me spin that around on you. You've got four people sitting down to make characters: Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Diane. Alice wants to make an undead hunter. Bob wants to make a master of all weapons. Charlie wants to make a scholar and polyglot. Diane wants to throw all the fireballs. ALL OF THEM.
They sit down and make their characters... then pass their sheets one person to the left. Should Bob be able to play Charlie's character as just as good a weaponmaster as the character Bob built to be a weaponmaster? No? Well gosh, then I guess Charlie's choices were bad for Bob!
Yes, it's pretty terrible when "maintain mathematical parity" is listed alongside the other options you can choose for your character, as though it weren't important. Yes, it's also terrible when options are strictly mechanically inferior to other options, like "+1 damage to undead" versus "+2 damage all the time".
But if your choices don't matter, if someone who didn't make any of them can do your thing just as well as you can, that's also terrible.
Balance does not demands your choices to be meaningless - merely that all possible permutations of the choices you can make result in an equally valid character that is good at a different set of things. You seem to conflate something being bad mechanically with something being unwanted. Charlie's choice is not mechanically bad; Bob just wanted to play something else. The only thing wrong in the whole scenario is people being forced to play characters they did not want to play - a situation the system itself did not cause.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
No one said it would be great to remove mastery altogether, nor was advocating its removal from PLAY (opposed to creation) mentioned. In fact just the opposite was said.
The optimal result being that:
+ Under absolute baseline/normal situations all characters played by their original creators are nominally as effective.
+ Under absolute baseline/normal situations characters played by a player unfamiliar with the mechanics are functional and effective* although slightly less effective than someone who's mastered those mechanics and is familiar with use.
+ Under situations where each specialty is important (undead, fire sensitive critters) those characters perform slightly better--enough that they do better, but not enough that they make the encounter a breeze.**
+ "weapon master" and "scholar" are fluff/thematic choices. An undead hunter could just as easily hunt undead with loads of different weapons, and scholar is a non-combat role. Even if the player deliberately says "I want my character to contribute absolutely nothing narratively to combat" a system cannot be expected to compensate for one player effectively saying they refuse to participate in part of the game. Cue "lazy warlord" style builds which contribute effectively to combat in a mechanical sense without having to do so narratively.
* Creating a situation in which a player who has not spent time familiarizing themselves with the intricacy of all mechanics cannot be effective or even functional is turning your game into homework, and directly violates the "ease of use" design principle.
** "Victory through character creation" is a poor design in anything other than a game designed to be played over a short period of time or where characters are re-created frequently. (in which case intricate character creation itself becomes a problem) Therefore bonuses to specialized situations should remain small.
EDIT: Also second everything GP just said. ;-)
Leper on
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
If I can't die during character creation then I don't wanna play that game anymore.
But seriously, you can have distinct options that are balanced. Yes, it is hard to balance. Tough shit, that's the designers job. That is what I'm paying them for when I buy their system.
If they aren't going to do that, I'm not buying their product. I don't need to buy D&D Next to play D&D. I've been playing it for years. I can see the proposed system, and look at every previous system and compare. I can rationalize my purchase much more than non-D&D systems and I have more reason to do so, since I already own a functional D&D system.
I mostly agree. I'd like to add that as long as the DM is going to be making content for the system (that is, they are not using pre-written adventures) they share the burden of design. The game should make clear how the DM should design the content, but nothing can save the user from themselves if they disregard the manual.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
No one said it would be great to remove mastery altogether, nor was advocating its removal from PLAY (opposed to creation) mentioned. In fact just the opposite was said.
This isn't mastery. This is just basic character decisions. And this isn't fluff, either. Everyone sat down to play Legends of Anglerre (a FATE-engine game) and put four stunts toward their character concept.
Alice's undead hunter took Crafter's Instinct, Signature Weapon, Disrupt Undead, and Destroy Undead at character creation. She starts play with her custom-built crossbow that fires darts that bypass an undead's normal defenses.
Bob's weapon master took Catch, Anything Goes, Close At Hand, and Weapons of the World. He can use anything he can pick up as if it were a "proper" weapon, and gets a bonus every time he swaps weapons in a fight because he's so darn versatile.
Charlie's scholar took Walking Library, Perfect Memory, Linguist, and Gift of Tongues. He can speak every language that exists and a large number of dead ones, and has perfect recollection of everything he's ever read, letting him "do research" by just sitting down and thinking for a while, or far faster if he has access to any books at all.
Diane's fire mage took Create Fire, Fire Storm, Multicast, and Area Attack, letting her hit lots of things with fireballs and spend the per-adventure resource called "fate points" to rain fiery destruction over large areas of the battlefield and/or for extended periods of time.
But then, stunts are kind of like superpowers in FATE. You've got your basic skill levels underneath them, and that's where all your combat/interaction/exploration values come from. Diane's basic fire bolt does the same damage as Alice's crossbow against non-undead targets, or Bob if he doesn't switch weapons for a while, or heck, even Charlie, if he wields a mean staff but doesn't define himself as a combatant. And everyone has Aspects, which are bits of their character concept they can spend fate points on for a wide variety of universal bonuses.
This really harkens back to earlier comments about how storygames use character choices as a sort of signaling system - Alice wants to fight hard undead targets, Diane wants to burn swarms of flammable chaff, Bob wants an excuse to grab tons of random things and beat dudes over the head with them, and Charlie wants the chance to add to his giant brain library. A GM doesn't have to give them everything they want, all the time, but because nobody took their stunts, these unique weird things that no one else can do, just to maintain parity with the monsters, the GM at least knows what they want.
[talks a lot about FATE, which I'm sure is a fine game when run by fine people, but most of it has absolutely zero to do with anything said in this post or previous ones]
This really harkens back to earlier comments about how storygames use character choices as a sort of signaling system - Alice wants to fight hard undead targets, Diane wants to burn swarms of flammable chaff, Bob wants an excuse to grab tons of random things and beat dudes over the head with them, and Charlie wants the chance to add to his giant brain library.. A GM doesn't have to give them everything they want, all the time, but because nobody took their stunts, these unique weird things that no one else can do, just to maintain parity with the monsters, the GM at least knows what they want.
Okay, now you're definitely goalpost switching.
What happens when we swap these FATE characters to the left? Are they just as effective as they were before? (In FATE, yes, they are.) Isn't that a HORRIBAD thing according to your last post? Why is it good now when you bring it up as an example of a different point that you're now claiming you were talking about all along?
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
I will agree that designers should probably split choices up into a few very general categories. Mostly combat vs non-combat. But to do that for every single possible situation will result in dozens of different "silos", with every character having to take X choices from every one. Your underwater silo, your undead enemies silo, your feywild silo, your ranged combat silo, your solo boss silo, etc. Of course, since some choices will be applicable to more than one of those and some won't so to keep that balanced you'll need your underwater undead silo, your ranged combat in the feywild silo, your underwater undead ranged combat in the feywild silo. Then you also have choices that only help ranged characters, only help melee characters, greatly help ranged more than melee, marginally help ranged more than melee...
You need to carefully consider when you have to separate the elements, and when supporting additional elements is worthwhile. Trying to do everything leads to a bloated game. If you need an undead silo, then perhaps you need to reconsider the way you designed the undead. Try to produce a solution using your standard system. If you cannot do that and cannot redesign the undead, then it is time to consider whether or not preserving the undead in their present position is worth the extra layer of crunch they require.
If you introduce something as broad and radically different as underwater combat (and your system did not already support it through being sufficiently abstract), then yes it is going to need a separate set of mechanics to support it.
EDIT: When you introduce choices that help one archetype over another (say, ranged or melee), just make sure they are slotted against the opposing archetype. For example, instead of making abilities that only help melee characters and abilities that only help ranged characters feats, make them class features and give them to the Fighter or the Ranger as they progress in levels. You can even make them choose between a set of similar abilities (e.g. +X Damage for melee Attacks VS +Y AB for melee attacks) at certain levels for increased customizability. Heck, instead of dividing these abilities between the classes you can just make feats themselves choices that give you a chain of related abilities over a few levels (and exlude you from taking other abilities slotted against them). It should work fine as long as you only make them available to classes that can make use of them as a precaution.
And maybe pulling choices from a hat being as good as deliberate choices is ideal for you, but it's far from ideal for everyone and to claim that it's bad game design to include synergies is just false. Sid Meier said something along the lines of "A good game is a series of interesting choices". If I may as well be pulling from a hat, then none of my choices are interesting. Almost every single game out there promotes deliberate choices and trying to synergize to some degree, whether it be on your own or between team mates.
The existence of bad choices is not necessary to make choices interesting when it comes to building a character - after all, all you are deciding is how you are going to interact with the actual game. Why not focus system mastery on actual play rather than on building your piece? Mekton Zeta has a tagline that stuck with me: "Death on the drawing board". In the vast majority of roleplaying games how you build your character is far more important than how well you play it, and given that you build a character for a few hours at best and play the character for years that seems backwards.
I actually agree with a lot of, though not all, of this post. But then, it's quite different than what you seemed to be saying before.
Something like undead can totally be represented within the framework with no special rules yet still require a separate silo under your previous post. In 4E, they simply have the keyword 'Undead' and typically are resistant to necrotic and vulnerable to radiant. This simple thing allows abilities like Turn Undead to work as expected. Do you think Turn Undead shouldn't exist? Because it being in the game causes some characters to be more effective in certain fights than others. So does the necrotic/radiant thing.
At the same time you can have situations with NO special rules that still favor some choices over others. For instance, there's the shield which can function as a small raft for its user, carrying them swiftly over water. Is this a horrible item to have in the game because some players may choose to spend precious resources on it but end up not being able to use it as much as they like? What about items/feats which allow you to make saves more easily? Are they poor design because there may be some encounters where their ability never comes up? I really don't think we need a whole silo for Save Enhancers. At some point you have to accept that some choices are going to be better in some situations and worse in others.
Your example of making choices either Fighter only or Ranger only, only works to some degree. What if the designers provide for melee/ranged hybrid fighters and ranged only rangers? The fighter gives up some of power in either for the versatility, and they end up balanced. But then a feat is added which increases the range of your ranged attacks by 1 square. It doesn't break balance so that you'd notice, but obviously this benefits the ranger more. Do you really want to deny it to the fighter because that would break balance just a little? I say make it available to both and let the fighter decide if it's worth it. I can understand wanting to protect players against making really poor choices but don't deny them all choices that are slightly better for some other class. Knowing when to partition off a choice for one build only and when not to is good game design, and it's hard.
And you're absolutely right that bad choices aren't necessary for interesting choices. In fact bad choices make for really boring choices because they aren't really choices at all, like with the Expertise feats. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that for choices to be interesting there must be some imbalances, some kind of trade-off. The role of the designer is to make sure that no choice becomes better in almost every situation, that the imbalances are too big. And that's hard.
The game you were describing was the newest Gamma World. Pulling all your character build choices from a hat (or mechanically identical, rolling dice), you're guaranteed to be basically on par with everyone else. It's a decent game, but I suspect that many people are like me in that they don't care nearly as much about their characters in GW because it loses the entire meta aspect of choosing a meaningful mechanical theme for their character, of creating someone who certainly has some flaws but also has their strengths and times to shine. A good game will allow that while making it impossible to create a character that can almost never shine or who constantly is the shiniest, but I also accept that that's basically an impossible goal, and getting even close is really freaking difficult. I think I just sit more on the Accept-That-Some-Stinkers-Will-Get-Through side of the fence rather than the Homogenize-Everything-To-Make-Sure-They-Don't side.
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AntimatterDevo Was RightGates of SteelRegistered Userregular
in gamma world's defense, there is a bit more to it than pure random chance
you can pick your weaponry and armor which alters your character, and there are Vocations which give you feats when you reach a certain level.
in addition, coming up with a backstory to justify the mostly randomly generated character's existence can be almost as rewarding, if not as rewarding, as coming up with a character and making them mechanically to fit the backstory.
What happens when we swap these FATE characters to the left? Are they just as effective as they were before? (In FATE, yes, they are.) Isn't that a HORRIBAD thing according to your last post? Why is it good now when you bring it up as an example of a different point that you're now claiming you were talking about all along?
I think maybe it was unclear pronoun antecedents, actually.
If you swap those FATE characters to the left, someone who didn't build them would certainly understand how to play them, but that's not the point.
The point is that Charlie's scholar wouldn't make a good weapon master, which is the character Bob wanted. Bob's weapon master wouldn't make a good undead hunter. Alice's undead hunter wouldn't make a good fire mage, and Diane's fire mage wouldn't make a good scholar. Depending on the build, they might be good at some of the same things the player's original character was, but they pale in comparison to the character the player originally made to fill the role. And there's nothing wrong with that.
What happens when we swap these FATE characters to the left? Are they just as effective as they were before? (In FATE, yes, they are.) Isn't that a HORRIBAD thing according to your last post? Why is it good now when you bring it up as an example of a different point that you're now claiming you were talking about all along?
I think maybe it was unclear pronoun antecedents, actually.
If you swap those FATE characters to the left, someone who didn't build them would certainly understand how to play them, but that's not the point.
The point is that Charlie's scholar wouldn't make a good weapon master, which is the character Bob wanted. Bob's weapon master wouldn't make a good undead hunter. Alice's undead hunter wouldn't make a good fire mage, and Diane's fire mage wouldn't make a good scholar. Depending on the build, they might be good at some of the same things the player's original character was, but they pale in comparison to the character the player originally made to fill the role. And there's nothing wrong with that.
That really doesn't connect to what you said earlier, though.
I think maybe it was unclear pronoun antecedents, actually.
If you swap those FATE characters to the left, someone who didn't build them would certainly understand how to play them, but that's not the point.
The point is that Charlie's scholar wouldn't make a good weapon master, which is the character Bob wanted. Bob's weapon master wouldn't make a good undead hunter. Alice's undead hunter wouldn't make a good fire mage, and Diane's fire mage wouldn't make a good scholar. Depending on the build, they might be good at some of the same things the player's original character was, but they pale in comparison to the character the player originally made to fill the role. And there's nothing wrong with that.
And straw manning again. It's so obvious it stings.
No one said the scholar would be an excellent book burner (fire mage... although there's a bit of interesting irony...) or any other swappable combo, nor did anyone say they should or would or could in any system anyone proposed or expressed any particular interest in achieving, creating, or playing.
It wasn't a problem of "confusing pronouns," it's a problem of you either utterly failing to read or just being so desperate to chalk something up in your "internet win" column, you'll argue that something no one said is wrong and thus you must be right. I'm going to be charitable and hope it's the first option.
I'm not even sure why you felt such a "point" was meritorious of a post.
Leper on
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
The "lazy warlord" builds were glorious in their narrative possibilities while still remaining effective within the core systems of the game. I absolutely adore them and wish systems would actually introduce such things deliberately, rather than simply being relegated to the oddities come up with by charop boards.
I will agree that designers should probably split choices up into a few very general categories. Mostly combat vs non-combat. But to do that for every single possible situation will result in dozens of different "silos", with every character having to take X choices from every one. Your underwater silo, your undead enemies silo, your feywild silo, your ranged combat silo, your solo boss silo, etc. Of course, since some choices will be applicable to more than one of those and some won't so to keep that balanced you'll need your underwater undead silo, your ranged combat in the feywild silo, your underwater undead ranged combat in the feywild silo. Then you also have choices that only help ranged characters, only help melee characters, greatly help ranged more than melee, marginally help ranged more than melee...
You need to carefully consider when you have to separate the elements, and when supporting additional elements is worthwhile. Trying to do everything leads to a bloated game. If you need an undead silo, then perhaps you need to reconsider the way you designed the undead. Try to produce a solution using your standard system. If you cannot do that and cannot redesign the undead, then it is time to consider whether or not preserving the undead in their present position is worth the extra layer of crunch they require.
If you introduce something as broad and radically different as underwater combat (and your system did not already support it through being sufficiently abstract), then yes it is going to need a separate set of mechanics to support it.
EDIT: When you introduce choices that help one archetype over another (say, ranged or melee), just make sure they are slotted against the opposing archetype. For example, instead of making abilities that only help melee characters and abilities that only help ranged characters feats, make them class features and give them to the Fighter or the Ranger as they progress in levels. You can even make them choose between a set of similar abilities (e.g. +X Damage for melee Attacks VS +Y AB for melee attacks) at certain levels for increased customizability. Heck, instead of dividing these abilities between the classes you can just make feats themselves choices that give you a chain of related abilities over a few levels (and exlude you from taking other abilities slotted against them). It should work fine as long as you only make them available to classes that can make use of them as a precaution.
And maybe pulling choices from a hat being as good as deliberate choices is ideal for you, but it's far from ideal for everyone and to claim that it's bad game design to include synergies is just false. Sid Meier said something along the lines of "A good game is a series of interesting choices". If I may as well be pulling from a hat, then none of my choices are interesting. Almost every single game out there promotes deliberate choices and trying to synergize to some degree, whether it be on your own or between team mates.
The existence of bad choices is not necessary to make choices interesting when it comes to building a character - after all, all you are deciding is how you are going to interact with the actual game. Why not focus system mastery on actual play rather than on building your piece? Mekton Zeta has a tagline that stuck with me: "Death on the drawing board". In the vast majority of roleplaying games how you build your character is far more important than how well you play it, and given that you build a character for a few hours at best and play the character for years that seems backwards.
I actually agree with a lot of, though not all, of this post. But then, it's quite different than what you seemed to be saying before.
Something like undead can totally be represented within the framework with no special rules yet still require a separate silo under your previous post. In 4E, they simply have the keyword 'Undead' and typically are resistant to necrotic and vulnerable to radiant. This simple thing allows abilities like Turn Undead to work as expected. Do you think Turn Undead shouldn't exist? Because it being in the game causes some characters to be more effective in certain fights than others. So does the necrotic/radiant thing.
Forgive me if I was ambiguous.
I think that abilities that only work against a very small segment of opponents you have no guarantee to face are extremely difficult to balance. Turn Undead was designed top-down (someone took the flavor and wrote mechanics for it) and it shows. If the game premise would you to estimate how many enemies of type X you are going to face then an ability that lets you be more effective against these opponents would be reasonable. For example: making bladed weapons more effective against opponents with light or no armor (or creatures without scales/etc), blunt weapons more effective against heavily armored opponents (or thick-hided monsters), and instructing the DM to try to use a roughly equal number of opponents bearing each armor type is what I would call a reasonable weakness-based design. This does not means they have to do so in every encounter. You might fight a group of knights one day and and a horde of gibberlings on another. But it does means that over the length of the campaign the overall number of opponents of each type you face should be as close to equal as possible.
Weaknesses to damage types are not treated with half the seriousness that they deserve. Making undead weak to Radiant damage and letting one class deal Radiant damage with an attack that is supposed to be as good as other attacks in encounters where the monster is not weak to it makes for a good simulation and a poor game.
At the same time you can have situations with NO special rules that still favor some choices over others. For instance, there's the shield which can function as a small raft for its user, carrying them swiftly over water. Is this a horrible item to have in the game because some players may choose to spend precious resources on it but end up not being able to use it as much as they like? What about items/feats which allow you to make saves more easily? Are they poor design because there may be some encounters where their ability never comes up? I really don't think we need a whole silo for Save Enhancers. At some point you have to accept that some choices are going to be better in some situations and worse in others.
You seem to have misunderstood some of what I was saying. Not everything should be useful in every encounter, but everything should prove its worth over the course of the entire campaign. Feats that improve saving throws are not problematic as long as saving throws come up often enough to make them as useful as the competition. It is okay if they are not useful in some encounters as long as they are very useful in others. The problem is when you have no guarantee that saving throws will be useful.
I actually have no problems with niche items, because you can frequently change your items and adapt to the circumstances. If you could rebuild your character as rapidly as switching your shield the previously mentioned problems wouldn't be all that problematic.
Your example of making choices either Fighter only or Ranger only, only works to some degree. What if the designers provide for melee/ranged hybrid fighters and ranged only rangers? The fighter gives up some of power in either for the versatility, and they end up balanced. But then a feat is added which increases the range of your ranged attacks by 1 square. It doesn't break balance so that you'd notice, but obviously this benefits the ranger more. Do you really want to deny it to the fighter because that would break balance just a little? I say make it available to both and let the fighter decide if it's worth it. I can understand wanting to protect players against making really poor choices but don't deny them all choices that are slightly better for some other class. Knowing when to partition off a choice for one build only and when not to is good game design, and it's hard.
I'd give the Fighter version of the feat a bonus just big enough to let it match the utility it gives the Ranger. You do not have to always deny such things, but using them as-is instead of altering them so they work just as well is the lazy way out. Agreed on the last line.
And you're absolutely right that bad choices aren't necessary for interesting choices. In fact bad choices make for really boring choices because they aren't really choices at all, like with the Expertise feats. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that for choices to be interesting there must be some imbalances, some kind of trade-off. The role of the designer is to make sure that no choice becomes better in almost every situation, that the imbalances are too big. And that's hard.
I think that we fell victim to the dreaded beast Semantics. I agree that different choices should result in characters that are good at different things, but I also think that every series of choices you make must result in a character that is not only viable, but just as viable (over the course of the campaign, if not in every battle) as any other characters. It is up to the player to figure out how to play them well. I am not sure we are disagreeing here.
The game you were describing was the newest Gamma World. Pulling all your character build choices from a hat (or mechanically identical, rolling dice), you're guaranteed to be basically on par with everyone else. It's a decent game, but I suspect that many people are like me in that they don't care nearly as much about their characters in GW because it loses the entire meta aspect of choosing a meaningful mechanical theme for their character, of creating someone who certainly has some flaws but also has their strengths and times to shine. A good game will allow that while making it impossible to create a character that can almost never shine or who constantly is the shiniest, but I also accept that that's basically an impossible goal, and getting even close is really freaking difficult. I think I just sit more on the Accept-That-Some-Stinkers-Will-Get-Through side of the fence rather than the Homogenize-Everything-To-Make-Sure-They-Don't side.
I agree with most of this, but I do not think that it is an impossible goal as long as you carefully limit the scope of what you are making. There is a golden path between accepting defeat and crushing everything into a grey mush. You can make a game where your build choices are meaningful (in the sense that they define how you are going to play the game and what situations you are better/worse at) while making sure every build is guaranteed to be roughly as useful - not necessarily in every situation but overall.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
No one said the scholar would be an excellent book burner (fire mage... although there's a bit of interesting irony...) or any other swappable combo, nor did anyone say they should or would or could in any system anyone proposed or expressed any particular interest in achieving, creating, or playing.
It wasn't a problem of "confusing pronouns," it's a problem of you either utterly failing to read or just being so desperate to chalk something up in your "internet win" column, you'll argue that something no one said is wrong and thus you must be right. I'm going to be charitable and hope it's the first option.
I'm not even sure why you felt such a "point" was meritorious of a post.
Yeah, it hasn't been a banner day for me expressing myself, has it?
Let me take one more run at this.
Alice's undead hunter is not "slightly better" in combat against undead. Alice's undead hunter is three dudes in combat against undead.
Similarly, Diane's fire mage is three dudes in combat against big swarms, Bob's weapon master is two dudes in combat pretty much all the time, and Charlie's scholar is three dudes in exploration at uncovering lore. Ideally the big capstone for these guys is, what, a fight against eight dudes' worth of undead army while Charlie tries to close the portal to Scarytown?
Next was pitched originally with the idea of there being these three pillars, three categories of things that are fun to do in D&D : exploration, combat, and interaction. And some characters were going to be better at some pillars than others. I should probably have made an interaction guy for the example, huh? Anyway.
Historically, this kind of design hasn't worked out so well for D&D. Bob's fighter is maybe an extra half a dude in combat as long as he's got the single type of weapon he's devoted his life to mastering, and Charlie's wizard is three dudes all the time because magic can do anything. And from reports of the "Nextified" encounter series going on they're not really doing a good job of rolling it out, either. Combats put an entire party up against a single ordinary monster or a handful of minions, and the exploration and interaction aren't much more than "You hear some boring narration. Make an Interesting Narration check to hear some interesting narration."
4E was a great tactical combat game. Combats were involved and detailed and every class and build could do interesting things in combat, even if those interesting things were "point at someone else to make an attack roll". Everything in that big bulleted list you posted would hold true in the Platonic ideal of 4E, There are advantages to having a well-balanced tactical combat game, too, most of which stem from being able to create a good fight based solely on knowing how many people showed up to play. You can write the big published adventures and the little micro ones to run in stores as Encounters.
But RPGs don't have to be involved tactical combat games. You can have a game that supports that sort of three-pillar design, and offer players choices that will wildly unbalance their character towards one of the three pillars -- as long as the game itself actually treats those pillars equally and most importantly has some kind of quick-resolution mechanic for each of them, so that combat doesn't take up 90% of the night unless people want it to. That kind of game is harder to GM for, and definitely harder to distribute published adventures or Encounters-style teasers for.
Did anyone in this thread disagree that as long as the Things characters are Good At are equally represented and of equal importance over the course of the campaign (rather than in every singular event), everything is fine?
My problem with underwater basketweaving being a Thing you can Take is that the GM is entirely responsible for making it as useful as other Things, at which point the usefulness of constructing characters systematically is questionable at best. While the GM is almost always responsible for making content, in a well-designed system they are ought to be able to do so without knowing who the characters are (at least on the mechanical front) by conforming to the expectations outlined by the system.
FATE is a good toolkit, but it is only as balanced as the GM makes it. 3.X can be said to be as balanced, in the sense that the GM can make it so by dicking with spellcasters or using magic-immune opponents. Note that this is not said in the defence of D&D 3.
EDIT: I do agree that it is harder to design a balanced game for this style of play, but that does not means it is impossible. It simply means you need to use very broad strokes or non-traditional mechanics.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
I'm actually a big fan of the way Iron Kingdoms RPG handles character creation - give the players four broad choices (race, archetype, 2 careers) then those options fill in all the numbers for them. It prevents them from making poor decision because of lack of system mastery and paints the character in such broad strokes you can still define them as whoever you want them to be. There's a little more to it than that but not that much more. Even equipment is already laid out based on your careers, though you may have to create yourself some mechanika. It deliberately designed to prevent players from making mistakes during character creation but doesn't hinder creativity.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
When someone makes a long series of extraordinary claims, each needs to be examined in turn. If someone says that A then B, but fails to prove A then there is no reason to address B before A is resolved. Not that this applies to the posters I am currently replying to.
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
My problem with underwater basketweaving being a Thing you can Take is that the GM is entirely responsible for making it as useful as other Things, at which point the usefulness of constructing characters systematically is questionable at best. While the GM is almost always responsible for making content, in a well-designed system they are ought to be able to do so without knowing who the characters are (at least on the mechanical front) by conforming to the expectations outlined by the system.
I'll say that the more involved content creation gets for the GM, the better off they are to have some context-independent basis to work from. 4E let you create opponents pretty quickly and easily because even though they all had to participate in the detailed tactical combat system, the underlying universal math assumptions fit on a business card. Compare to 3E where that sort of thing was a convoluted mess, even sometimes when you were prepping monsters in the book to run because surprise! they also cast spells as a 13th-level sorceror, so get pickin', screen monkey.
A system that lets you create imbalanced characters and expects the GM to create fitting opposition for them needs to make that as easy as possible - again, it helps if the system doesn't have a lot of crunch or involved conflict resolution to it.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
When someone makes a long series of extraordinary claims, each needs to be examined in turn. If someone says that A then B, but fails to prove A then there is no reason to address B before A is resolved. Not that this applies to the posters I am currently replying to.
However, the other readers have read A, B, C.....Z and assembled them into a single point in their mind, usually. You can address them all in a post that is placed after Z, using cohesive devices and sentence structure to refer to parts of their argument.
If you don't do that, but rely instead on physically breaking up the post, the usual effect on other readers is of a bewilderingly staccato jump between posters. The second, debate-related, problem is that this method often addresses particular sentences out of context, and that addressing the post as a whole may well make clear a context which shows those criticisms to be invalid.
First off Glaz, I'm not sure what any of this has to do with my original post that you directly responded to, or even that response. (We were talking about the inclusion of trap options that are nothing but trap options, since you see to have forgotten.) Still, this new goalpost is vaguely interesting, so let's take a shot at it!
I apologize for the unpopular format, but... I really don't know how else to address all the "points" you've made here.
Alice's undead hunter is not "slightly better" in combat against undead. Alice's undead hunter is three dudes in combat against undead. Similarly, Diane's[...]
First let's address how awful your proposed design is.
In combat:
Alice is 3 people under condition X
Diane is 3 people under condition Y.
Bob always equals 2 people.
Charlie is effectively a non-participant.
To balance out three people's contributions:
2 out of every three opponents must be undead, 2 our of every three opponents must be swarms/fire sensitive, (this numer increases with anything else fire resistant) and Charlie can hang out for RP purposes, but in most cases he could go have a smoke break anytime there is combat and ask folks to tell him what happened when he comes back.
Bob (theoretically) winds up in the best spot here--of course judging by your later comments, Bob surely must be less useful in the other "two pillars," so he probably spends a lot of time taking smoke breaks too.
Now I'm all for saying that campaign design should be a dialogue between the world (DM created) and the PCs (player created) but we've just cut out a whole lot of vocabulary options because of some awful design which means that unless we knowingly elect to exclude one or more players from entire swaths of play, we'll wind up with a pretty boring and repetitive conversation.
This is fundamentally flawed design.
Liking it doesn't make you a bad person, and I both respect and encourage you to play whatever sort of game suits you as long as it involves consenting adults. But it objectively flawed in its approach. We can say "well that depends on what the designers were going for, maybe they wanted to make a game that railroads players and DMs into making anti-social choices in a social game," but we're just doing the equivalent of saying "maybe they purposefully designed bad mechanics and these mechanics are bad, thus they succeeded, so it's a success!"
Next was pitched originally with the idea of there being these three pillars, three categories of things that are fun to do in D&D : exploration, combat, and interaction. And some characters were going to be better at some pillars than others. I should probably have made an interaction guy for the example, huh? Anyway.
Don't bother. This is taking the design from bad to worse.
Now you're not only limiting combat design, but you're limiting exploration and interaction. Providing an unbeatable challenge is crap, so that's out. Our intrepid heroes must now explore and interact only in situations where one competent person could succeed, or at least one competent person and three idiots.
Who gets to be the idiots? Everyone but Charlie, apparently. (or everyone but our 5th 'interactive' example.)
All this design does is transfer our problems in either extremely restrictive design or intentionally excluding players to every other part of the mechanics. It's bad design for combat, it's bad design for everything else, too.
Historically, this kind of design hasn't worked out so well for D&D. Bob's fighter is maybe an extra half a dude in combat as long as he's got the single type of weapon he's devoted his life to mastering, and Charlie's wizard is three dudes all the time because magic can do anything. And from reports of the "Nextified" encounter series going on they're not really doing a good job of rolling it out, either. Combats put an entire party up against a single ordinary monster or a handful of minions, and the exploration and interaction aren't much more than "You hear some boring narration. Make an Interesting Narration check to hear some interesting narration."
Historically, this design hasn't worked out for any game. Ever. It doesn't last because it's crap design.
4E was a great tactical combat game.
Actually it was a pretty good game all around. Most of the places it was awful were the places where they held over flawed design from previous editions, or simply forgot to do their math properly, or decided "O NOES, PAIZO TOOK OUR CUSTOMERZ Y'ALL," and rolled back to awful design decisions in the name of nostalgia.
But RPGs don't have to be involved tactical combat games. You can have a game that supports that sort of three-pillar design, and offer players choices that will wildly unbalance their character towards one of the three pillars -- as long as the game itself actually treats those pillars equally and most importantly has some kind of quick-resolution mechanic for each of them, so that combat doesn't take up 90% of the night unless people want it to. That kind of game is harder to GM for, and definitely harder to distribute published adventures or Encounters-style teasers for.
And here we come to the absolute crux of the problems with this post.
Specializing in "one pillar" at the expense of others is awful. If I gather 6 people around my table for four hours, under no circumstances should I be able to average having only 4 present with no noticeable change in play. That's the end result of this design. "Combat heavy game tonight Charlie, would you like to borrow my Game Boy?" You don't balance them against each other, you balance them discretely. Just as the convention of "roles" was applied in 4e to help balance out combat contribution by providing specializations that worked together but in very different ways, an implementation of similar design precepts to interaction/exploration in which everyone contributes in specific and necessary but different ways is an excellent design goal. It need not be as formalized and mechanically involved as combat is (and really should not be) but it should maintain the concept of everyone's contribution being necessary at all times.
That way, genuinely excellent ideas like:
Ideally the big capstone for these guys is, what, a fight against eight dudes' worth of undead army while Charlie tries to close the portal to Scarytown?
become a wonderful way to add variety, rather than the only way to keep Charlie meaningfully involved.
Leper on
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
What incentive is there to spend Expertise Dice performing a fancy maneuver if a direct damage maneuver like Deadly Strike ends the battle more quickly?
It’s true that some maneuvers are situational in their best use, and using expertise dice for damage is often the best way to win a fight. We think that’s OK, because combats are moving along quickly and that’s one of the big goals of the game. At the same time, we’re always trying to make sure that any effect other than damage has a use and a time to shine. You might ask, “Why would I knock a monster down when I could use that damage die to end the fight faster?” In a straight-up fight, that’s possibly true. But there are other situations in which having the option there to knock someone down is really beneficial. For example, against a heavily armored opponent, I might choose to knock the creature down so that my companion has advantage on his or her next melee attack against it. Or, my companion might need to run away, so I knock the target down so it takes a penalty to any opportunity attacks it makes against my companion. Those are situational, but they aren’t so rare that knocking someone down is pointless.
We’re not looking to artificially limit the use of maneuvers at this time to force players to choose between damage and something other than damage. We think it’s fine for maneuvers to come up only when the opportunity presents itself, so that when it does come up the character using the maneuver feels good for having it.
Holy shit.
"Look, you may find combat boring, that's okay, because at least it goes fast. We understand that you just want our dull swingy bullshit to be over as quickly as possible! We've got you covered. While we're on it, you're right, we basically said "fuck balancing combat options", we intend to steer you down the path of just deal damage, because we have fuck-all ideas on how to introduce interesting combat options into our rickety shit design mantra of "just relate all combat situations to advantage/disadvantage". So if you find a case where you actually found value in the non-damage options, you should feel good about yourself because you did what the designers of the game could not."
"Oh, and the races have little reason to be changed, because it's not like humans are ubermensch or anything."
3DS: 2466-2307-8384 PSN: bssteph Steam:bsstephanTwitch:bsstephan Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e Occasional words about games:my site
All that follows is highly anecdotal, and I do not in any represent it as universal.
My switch to 4e was... troubled. One of my group in particular was dead set against switching and the result was a 30 year old man--otherwise a respectable adult--threw a tantrum in my living room and made 5 other players exceptionally uncomfortable.
The next time we tried it (sans that player and his wife) people had a great time. When they talked about it later to that person, what they remarked most on was the combat. His immediate reaction (and immediate point the next time we talked about anything) was that 4e must be nothing but combat!
We actually had one combat. It was intended to be a big deal, and took a while, but we spent less of the night engaged in semi-mindless violence than anything else by far. I had players tell me how much they loved the NPCs and where they thought the story was going, and spent about two hours hanging out after the game just trying to pry secrets out of me and speculating on the story, so it obviously wasn't the only thing they liked.
So why mention the fight? Because at our table good story was a given. We've been pretty lucky in that our group has some excellent storytellers. But combat was usually a giant hassle. It was either "wait cast the right spell and it's immediately over" or "two hour grind fest because no one has the right spell, and any other kind of combat takes forever." A fun fight was an exceptional and new thing for us.
4e combat didn't always work. It needed refinement, and I won't say otherwise--it was hard to create genuine skirmishes, Solo design was an excellent idea but the initial implementation was off and the later implementation was wonky. Nothing scaled right, and a lot of options were a lot better than some of the others, (by 4e standards... by any other edition, they were astonishingly close.) and it needed ways to keep all the players involved off turn instead of just the defender. (Mark/reprisal system was genius in that regard) But it was a lot better than the alternatives.
All of the apologist crap in the QA/LL column has got me wondering... What game were these guys playing?
If my role play is hindered by rolling to play, then I'd prefer the rolls play right, instead of steam-rolling play-night.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
When someone makes a long series of extraordinary claims, each needs to be examined in turn. If someone says that A then B, but fails to prove A then there is no reason to address B before A is resolved. Not that this applies to the posters I am currently replying to.
However, the other readers have read A, B, C.....Z and assembled them into a single point in their mind, usually. You can address them all in a post that is placed after Z, using cohesive devices and sentence structure to refer to parts of their argument.
If you don't do that, but rely instead on physically breaking up the post, the usual effect on other readers is of a bewilderingly staccato jump between posters. The second, debate-related, problem is that this method often addresses particular sentences out of context, and that addressing the post as a whole may well make clear a context which shows those criticisms to be invalid.
Since most of the people here prefer your sort of formatting, I already make minimal use of block-quoting. I increased the amount a bit in that post and asked whether that sort of formatting is still displeasing to your collective eyes when each paragraph is significantly longer.
Since I do not believe I have actually taken something out of context (nor has anyone backed their accusation with a specific example of such) I don't think that's a fair argument to levy against me.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
I know people hate to hear this but D&D has always been about combat. The percentage certainly varies from campaign to campaign but if it gets much below 40% you're playing a very different game.
If 40% of your game is something you need to rush through you've fucked up.
If that same 40% is where your actual product is primarily applied....you've really fucked up.
You could argue its war gaming roots would tie the game to combat but it's pretty clear that d&d became something different soon after its birth from chainmail.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
When someone makes a long series of extraordinary claims, each needs to be examined in turn. If someone says that A then B, but fails to prove A then there is no reason to address B before A is resolved. Not that this applies to the posters I am currently replying to.
However, the other readers have read A, B, C.....Z and assembled them into a single point in their mind, usually. You can address them all in a post that is placed after Z, using cohesive devices and sentence structure to refer to parts of their argument.
If you don't do that, but rely instead on physically breaking up the post, the usual effect on other readers is of a bewilderingly staccato jump between posters. The second, debate-related, problem is that this method often addresses particular sentences out of context, and that addressing the post as a whole may well make clear a context which shows those criticisms to be invalid.
Since most of the people here prefer your sort of formatting, I already make minimal use of block-quoting. I increased the amount a bit in that post and asked whether that sort of formatting is still displeasing to your collective eyes when each paragraph is significantly longer.
Since I do not believe I have actually taken something out of context (nor has anyone backed their accusation with a specific example of such) I don't think that's a fair argument to levy against me.
Oh sorry, I should have been clearer. I wasn't accusing you of that!
The Playtest Caves of Chaos certainly had some bizarre mechanics for finding traps and I think my brain deliberately blocked out the jumping rules.
Mostly, but noncombat stuff in D&D, be they skills, social mechanics, or whatever, have never been done particularly well. At best, they've been functional, at worst, well, you have pixel-bitching with the DM.
The thing with RPGs is that a bad GM will find ways to make a game suck and a good GM will find ways to make it good.
The presence of Pixel Bitching is something almost entirely unrelated to the mechanics of a game. It's much more linked to GM advice and adventure design. Advise the GM how to avoid it and give example adventures where it's not likely to occur and there's not much more you can do.
It might seem like having a Spot or Search mechanic would remove this, but as soon as the party fail that roll to find the vital object then you're in the same situation as if you had no skill mechanics at all. I don't use Skills and I'm very happy with how searching, sneaking and social activity works in my games.
As for social mechanics, I think the Reaction Table is something sorely missing from recent editions.
The thing with RPGs is how about all us average GMs?
That's where design matters.
And of course, there are lots more of us average GMs than the maladjusted fuckmuppets or the bardic geniuses.
Also, as an old man with kid and job to take care of, I might be able to find my hidden bardic genius, had I the time. But I don't. So I don't have time to balance your game for you, WOTC. I have time to GM semi-improv narrativist games, because they don't expect me to have unlimited free time.
Posts
Introduction of bad (or even sub-optimal) choices does not make the optimal choices interesting. it just makes them not suck. Hiding the bad choices among the good in a puzzle of character creation might seem interesting to some, but the player whose interest is in playing and not in character generation is unlikely to think so. It does make sense that people would find generation interesting--males especially respond strongly and positively to elements of system mastery in games.
The alternative is to create options (as mentioned) that are all relatively close in effectiveness under general conditions with situational bonuses. Having those bonuses grant SMALL synergies with the character's other options or those of other players is nice, as well. Keeping them small allows for the designer to include more synergistic choices without either forcing them on players, requiring large compensations throughout the system, or having to limit choices.
As dumb as that is, I can see where he is coming from.
But even if you want system mastery to be part of character creation, how do you do that if the internet exists and people can just copy the good builds.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
The problem with that (esp. in a table-top RPG) is that these choices are tied to concepts that the players will choose to define the character they will play.
Whether they choose the option because it fits the concept in their head, or alter the concept to fit the option they find to be interesting, bad choices still make someone's idea of "cool" to be "shit" in a mechanical sense. While far less misanthropic and severe, it's the equivalent of telling your players "if you want to make concept X and actually be a hero, because your imagination says that's not just possible but desirable, then your imagination is wrong."
When we're talking about a game that is ostensibly a game of cooperative imagination, outright declaring someone to be "wrong" before even beginning play is what I'd call a fundamental failure of your design process.
Right. Especially for MMORPGs, those are a bad kind of customer because part of their enjoyment over your game is (apparently) derived from having something over the "unviable" characters, be it just general sense of being better, some kind of exploit, being the "elite" who can finish the too hard quests, whatever. For games where you want everyone buying all of your product, continuously, that is a bad customer to cater to. You want everyone building viable characters.
Hell, for 4e, I'd say that unless you were being intentionally malicious to yourself in chargen, you can take any combination of decisions ("randomly") and have something that is at least "viable". 4e by no means got universal internal balance completely right, but it was probably the closest of D&D, and a solid rejection of 3e style system mastery. I'd hoped that all of the same complaints about 4e (whether or not true) prompted the developers to say "Yes, we are doing something right. Print all the balance!" As is the theme of this thread, apparently the masters of 5e learned nothing from 4e's successes.
And, indeed, once a forum for chargen builds exists, the entire mastery canard is pretty much a joke. At worst, it becomes the only way to make a character, which probably means as a consequence that your devs wasted a bunch of time and money on the suboptimal things that no one picks anymore because the community bias is that they are "wrong" or "traps" or whatever. 4e has traps (poor Linguist, it is getting battered in this thread), but not really all that many.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
Okay, let me spin that around on you. You've got four people sitting down to make characters: Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Diane. Alice wants to make an undead hunter. Bob wants to make a master of all weapons. Charlie wants to make a scholar and polyglot. Diane wants to throw all the fireballs. ALL OF THEM.
They sit down and make their characters... then pass their sheets one person to the left. Should Bob be able to play Charlie's character as just as good a weaponmaster as the character Bob built to be a weaponmaster? No? Well gosh, then I guess Charlie's choices were bad for Bob!
Yes, it's pretty terrible when "maintain mathematical parity" is listed alongside the other options you can choose for your character, as though it weren't important. Yes, it's also terrible when options are strictly mechanically inferior to other options, like "+1 damage to undead" versus "+2 damage all the time".
But if your choices don't matter, if someone who didn't make any of them can do your thing just as well as you can, that's also terrible.
No one said it would be great to remove mastery altogether, nor was advocating its removal from PLAY (opposed to creation) mentioned. In fact just the opposite was said.
The optimal result being that:
+ Under absolute baseline/normal situations all characters played by their original creators are nominally as effective.
+ Under absolute baseline/normal situations characters played by a player unfamiliar with the mechanics are functional and effective* although slightly less effective than someone who's mastered those mechanics and is familiar with use.
+ Under situations where each specialty is important (undead, fire sensitive critters) those characters perform slightly better--enough that they do better, but not enough that they make the encounter a breeze.**
+ "weapon master" and "scholar" are fluff/thematic choices. An undead hunter could just as easily hunt undead with loads of different weapons, and scholar is a non-combat role. Even if the player deliberately says "I want my character to contribute absolutely nothing narratively to combat" a system cannot be expected to compensate for one player effectively saying they refuse to participate in part of the game. Cue "lazy warlord" style builds which contribute effectively to combat in a mechanical sense without having to do so narratively.
* Creating a situation in which a player who has not spent time familiarizing themselves with the intricacy of all mechanics cannot be effective or even functional is turning your game into homework, and directly violates the "ease of use" design principle.
** "Victory through character creation" is a poor design in anything other than a game designed to be played over a short period of time or where characters are re-created frequently. (in which case intricate character creation itself becomes a problem) Therefore bonuses to specialized situations should remain small.
EDIT: Also second everything GP just said. ;-)
But seriously, you can have distinct options that are balanced. Yes, it is hard to balance. Tough shit, that's the designers job. That is what I'm paying them for when I buy their system.
If they aren't going to do that, I'm not buying their product. I don't need to buy D&D Next to play D&D. I've been playing it for years. I can see the proposed system, and look at every previous system and compare. I can rationalize my purchase much more than non-D&D systems and I have more reason to do so, since I already own a functional D&D system.
D&D Next is the trap option.
This isn't mastery. This is just basic character decisions. And this isn't fluff, either. Everyone sat down to play Legends of Anglerre (a FATE-engine game) and put four stunts toward their character concept.
Alice's undead hunter took Crafter's Instinct, Signature Weapon, Disrupt Undead, and Destroy Undead at character creation. She starts play with her custom-built crossbow that fires darts that bypass an undead's normal defenses.
Bob's weapon master took Catch, Anything Goes, Close At Hand, and Weapons of the World. He can use anything he can pick up as if it were a "proper" weapon, and gets a bonus every time he swaps weapons in a fight because he's so darn versatile.
Charlie's scholar took Walking Library, Perfect Memory, Linguist, and Gift of Tongues. He can speak every language that exists and a large number of dead ones, and has perfect recollection of everything he's ever read, letting him "do research" by just sitting down and thinking for a while, or far faster if he has access to any books at all.
Diane's fire mage took Create Fire, Fire Storm, Multicast, and Area Attack, letting her hit lots of things with fireballs and spend the per-adventure resource called "fate points" to rain fiery destruction over large areas of the battlefield and/or for extended periods of time.
But then, stunts are kind of like superpowers in FATE. You've got your basic skill levels underneath them, and that's where all your combat/interaction/exploration values come from. Diane's basic fire bolt does the same damage as Alice's crossbow against non-undead targets, or Bob if he doesn't switch weapons for a while, or heck, even Charlie, if he wields a mean staff but doesn't define himself as a combatant. And everyone has Aspects, which are bits of their character concept they can spend fate points on for a wide variety of universal bonuses.
This really harkens back to earlier comments about how storygames use character choices as a sort of signaling system - Alice wants to fight hard undead targets, Diane wants to burn swarms of flammable chaff, Bob wants an excuse to grab tons of random things and beat dudes over the head with them, and Charlie wants the chance to add to his giant brain library. A GM doesn't have to give them everything they want, all the time, but because nobody took their stunts, these unique weird things that no one else can do, just to maintain parity with the monsters, the GM at least knows what they want.
That is system mastery in character creation.
If you're claiming that's not what you are/were talking about, you're either goalpost switching or being purposefully obtuse.
Okay, now you're definitely goalpost switching.
What happens when we swap these FATE characters to the left? Are they just as effective as they were before? (In FATE, yes, they are.) Isn't that a HORRIBAD thing according to your last post? Why is it good now when you bring it up as an example of a different point that you're now claiming you were talking about all along?
I actually agree with a lot of, though not all, of this post. But then, it's quite different than what you seemed to be saying before.
Something like undead can totally be represented within the framework with no special rules yet still require a separate silo under your previous post. In 4E, they simply have the keyword 'Undead' and typically are resistant to necrotic and vulnerable to radiant. This simple thing allows abilities like Turn Undead to work as expected. Do you think Turn Undead shouldn't exist? Because it being in the game causes some characters to be more effective in certain fights than others. So does the necrotic/radiant thing.
At the same time you can have situations with NO special rules that still favor some choices over others. For instance, there's the shield which can function as a small raft for its user, carrying them swiftly over water. Is this a horrible item to have in the game because some players may choose to spend precious resources on it but end up not being able to use it as much as they like? What about items/feats which allow you to make saves more easily? Are they poor design because there may be some encounters where their ability never comes up? I really don't think we need a whole silo for Save Enhancers. At some point you have to accept that some choices are going to be better in some situations and worse in others.
Your example of making choices either Fighter only or Ranger only, only works to some degree. What if the designers provide for melee/ranged hybrid fighters and ranged only rangers? The fighter gives up some of power in either for the versatility, and they end up balanced. But then a feat is added which increases the range of your ranged attacks by 1 square. It doesn't break balance so that you'd notice, but obviously this benefits the ranger more. Do you really want to deny it to the fighter because that would break balance just a little? I say make it available to both and let the fighter decide if it's worth it. I can understand wanting to protect players against making really poor choices but don't deny them all choices that are slightly better for some other class. Knowing when to partition off a choice for one build only and when not to is good game design, and it's hard.
And you're absolutely right that bad choices aren't necessary for interesting choices. In fact bad choices make for really boring choices because they aren't really choices at all, like with the Expertise feats. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that for choices to be interesting there must be some imbalances, some kind of trade-off. The role of the designer is to make sure that no choice becomes better in almost every situation, that the imbalances are too big. And that's hard.
The game you were describing was the newest Gamma World. Pulling all your character build choices from a hat (or mechanically identical, rolling dice), you're guaranteed to be basically on par with everyone else. It's a decent game, but I suspect that many people are like me in that they don't care nearly as much about their characters in GW because it loses the entire meta aspect of choosing a meaningful mechanical theme for their character, of creating someone who certainly has some flaws but also has their strengths and times to shine. A good game will allow that while making it impossible to create a character that can almost never shine or who constantly is the shiniest, but I also accept that that's basically an impossible goal, and getting even close is really freaking difficult. I think I just sit more on the Accept-That-Some-Stinkers-Will-Get-Through side of the fence rather than the Homogenize-Everything-To-Make-Sure-They-Don't side.
you can pick your weaponry and armor which alters your character, and there are Vocations which give you feats when you reach a certain level.
in addition, coming up with a backstory to justify the mostly randomly generated character's existence can be almost as rewarding, if not as rewarding, as coming up with a character and making them mechanically to fit the backstory.
I think maybe it was unclear pronoun antecedents, actually.
If you swap those FATE characters to the left, someone who didn't build them would certainly understand how to play them, but that's not the point.
The point is that Charlie's scholar wouldn't make a good weapon master, which is the character Bob wanted. Bob's weapon master wouldn't make a good undead hunter. Alice's undead hunter wouldn't make a good fire mage, and Diane's fire mage wouldn't make a good scholar. Depending on the build, they might be good at some of the same things the player's original character was, but they pale in comparison to the character the player originally made to fill the role. And there's nothing wrong with that.
That really doesn't connect to what you said earlier, though.
No one said the scholar would be an excellent book burner (fire mage... although there's a bit of interesting irony...) or any other swappable combo, nor did anyone say they should or would or could in any system anyone proposed or expressed any particular interest in achieving, creating, or playing.
It wasn't a problem of "confusing pronouns," it's a problem of you either utterly failing to read or just being so desperate to chalk something up in your "internet win" column, you'll argue that something no one said is wrong and thus you must be right. I'm going to be charitable and hope it's the first option.
I'm not even sure why you felt such a "point" was meritorious of a post.
I think that abilities that only work against a very small segment of opponents you have no guarantee to face are extremely difficult to balance. Turn Undead was designed top-down (someone took the flavor and wrote mechanics for it) and it shows. If the game premise would you to estimate how many enemies of type X you are going to face then an ability that lets you be more effective against these opponents would be reasonable. For example: making bladed weapons more effective against opponents with light or no armor (or creatures without scales/etc), blunt weapons more effective against heavily armored opponents (or thick-hided monsters), and instructing the DM to try to use a roughly equal number of opponents bearing each armor type is what I would call a reasonable weakness-based design. This does not means they have to do so in every encounter. You might fight a group of knights one day and and a horde of gibberlings on another. But it does means that over the length of the campaign the overall number of opponents of each type you face should be as close to equal as possible.
Weaknesses to damage types are not treated with half the seriousness that they deserve. Making undead weak to Radiant damage and letting one class deal Radiant damage with an attack that is supposed to be as good as other attacks in encounters where the monster is not weak to it makes for a good simulation and a poor game.
You seem to have misunderstood some of what I was saying. Not everything should be useful in every encounter, but everything should prove its worth over the course of the entire campaign. Feats that improve saving throws are not problematic as long as saving throws come up often enough to make them as useful as the competition. It is okay if they are not useful in some encounters as long as they are very useful in others. The problem is when you have no guarantee that saving throws will be useful.
I actually have no problems with niche items, because you can frequently change your items and adapt to the circumstances. If you could rebuild your character as rapidly as switching your shield the previously mentioned problems wouldn't be all that problematic.
I'd give the Fighter version of the feat a bonus just big enough to let it match the utility it gives the Ranger. You do not have to always deny such things, but using them as-is instead of altering them so they work just as well is the lazy way out. Agreed on the last line.
I think that we fell victim to the dreaded beast Semantics. I agree that different choices should result in characters that are good at different things, but I also think that every series of choices you make must result in a character that is not only viable, but just as viable (over the course of the campaign, if not in every battle) as any other characters. It is up to the player to figure out how to play them well. I am not sure we are disagreeing here.
I agree with most of this, but I do not think that it is an impossible goal as long as you carefully limit the scope of what you are making. There is a golden path between accepting defeat and crushing everything into a grey mush. You can make a game where your build choices are meaningful (in the sense that they define how you are going to play the game and what situations you are better/worse at) while making sure every build is guaranteed to be roughly as useful - not necessarily in every situation but overall.
If the formatting grates on your nerves tell me so. I have been told that I am a bit too quote-happy in this thread.
Yeah, it hasn't been a banner day for me expressing myself, has it?
Let me take one more run at this.
Alice's undead hunter is not "slightly better" in combat against undead. Alice's undead hunter is three dudes in combat against undead.
Similarly, Diane's fire mage is three dudes in combat against big swarms, Bob's weapon master is two dudes in combat pretty much all the time, and Charlie's scholar is three dudes in exploration at uncovering lore. Ideally the big capstone for these guys is, what, a fight against eight dudes' worth of undead army while Charlie tries to close the portal to Scarytown?
Next was pitched originally with the idea of there being these three pillars, three categories of things that are fun to do in D&D : exploration, combat, and interaction. And some characters were going to be better at some pillars than others. I should probably have made an interaction guy for the example, huh? Anyway.
Historically, this kind of design hasn't worked out so well for D&D. Bob's fighter is maybe an extra half a dude in combat as long as he's got the single type of weapon he's devoted his life to mastering, and Charlie's wizard is three dudes all the time because magic can do anything. And from reports of the "Nextified" encounter series going on they're not really doing a good job of rolling it out, either. Combats put an entire party up against a single ordinary monster or a handful of minions, and the exploration and interaction aren't much more than "You hear some boring narration. Make an Interesting Narration check to hear some interesting narration."
4E was a great tactical combat game. Combats were involved and detailed and every class and build could do interesting things in combat, even if those interesting things were "point at someone else to make an attack roll". Everything in that big bulleted list you posted would hold true in the Platonic ideal of 4E, There are advantages to having a well-balanced tactical combat game, too, most of which stem from being able to create a good fight based solely on knowing how many people showed up to play. You can write the big published adventures and the little micro ones to run in stores as Encounters.
But RPGs don't have to be involved tactical combat games. You can have a game that supports that sort of three-pillar design, and offer players choices that will wildly unbalance their character towards one of the three pillars -- as long as the game itself actually treats those pillars equally and most importantly has some kind of quick-resolution mechanic for each of them, so that combat doesn't take up 90% of the night unless people want it to. That kind of game is harder to GM for, and definitely harder to distribute published adventures or Encounters-style teasers for.
My problem with underwater basketweaving being a Thing you can Take is that the GM is entirely responsible for making it as useful as other Things, at which point the usefulness of constructing characters systematically is questionable at best. While the GM is almost always responsible for making content, in a well-designed system they are ought to be able to do so without knowing who the characters are (at least on the mechanical front) by conforming to the expectations outlined by the system.
FATE is a good toolkit, but it is only as balanced as the GM makes it. 3.X can be said to be as balanced, in the sense that the GM can make it so by dicking with spellcasters or using magic-immune opponents. Note that this is not said in the defence of D&D 3.
EDIT: I do agree that it is harder to design a balanced game for this style of play, but that does not means it is impossible. It simply means you need to use very broad strokes or non-traditional mechanics.
It's not that the formatting grates people (well, it does, but that's not the issue), the problem is when you do that you are reframing their arguments and frequently failing to address the point being made.
I'm actually a big fan of the way Iron Kingdoms RPG handles character creation - give the players four broad choices (race, archetype, 2 careers) then those options fill in all the numbers for them. It prevents them from making poor decision because of lack of system mastery and paints the character in such broad strokes you can still define them as whoever you want them to be. There's a little more to it than that but not that much more. Even equipment is already laid out based on your careers, though you may have to create yourself some mechanika. It deliberately designed to prevent players from making mistakes during character creation but doesn't hinder creativity.
When someone makes a long series of extraordinary claims, each needs to be examined in turn. If someone says that A then B, but fails to prove A then there is no reason to address B before A is resolved. Not that this applies to the posters I am currently replying to.
I'll say that the more involved content creation gets for the GM, the better off they are to have some context-independent basis to work from. 4E let you create opponents pretty quickly and easily because even though they all had to participate in the detailed tactical combat system, the underlying universal math assumptions fit on a business card. Compare to 3E where that sort of thing was a convoluted mess, even sometimes when you were prepping monsters in the book to run because surprise! they also cast spells as a 13th-level sorceror, so get pickin', screen monkey.
A system that lets you create imbalanced characters and expects the GM to create fitting opposition for them needs to make that as easy as possible - again, it helps if the system doesn't have a lot of crunch or involved conflict resolution to it.
However, the other readers have read A, B, C.....Z and assembled them into a single point in their mind, usually. You can address them all in a post that is placed after Z, using cohesive devices and sentence structure to refer to parts of their argument.
If you don't do that, but rely instead on physically breaking up the post, the usual effect on other readers is of a bewilderingly staccato jump between posters. The second, debate-related, problem is that this method often addresses particular sentences out of context, and that addressing the post as a whole may well make clear a context which shows those criticisms to be invalid.
I apologize for the unpopular format, but... I really don't know how else to address all the "points" you've made here.
First let's address how awful your proposed design is.
In combat:
Alice is 3 people under condition X
Diane is 3 people under condition Y.
Bob always equals 2 people.
Charlie is effectively a non-participant.
To balance out three people's contributions:
2 out of every three opponents must be undead, 2 our of every three opponents must be swarms/fire sensitive, (this numer increases with anything else fire resistant) and Charlie can hang out for RP purposes, but in most cases he could go have a smoke break anytime there is combat and ask folks to tell him what happened when he comes back.
Bob (theoretically) winds up in the best spot here--of course judging by your later comments, Bob surely must be less useful in the other "two pillars," so he probably spends a lot of time taking smoke breaks too.
Now I'm all for saying that campaign design should be a dialogue between the world (DM created) and the PCs (player created) but we've just cut out a whole lot of vocabulary options because of some awful design which means that unless we knowingly elect to exclude one or more players from entire swaths of play, we'll wind up with a pretty boring and repetitive conversation.
This is fundamentally flawed design.
Liking it doesn't make you a bad person, and I both respect and encourage you to play whatever sort of game suits you as long as it involves consenting adults. But it objectively flawed in its approach. We can say "well that depends on what the designers were going for, maybe they wanted to make a game that railroads players and DMs into making anti-social choices in a social game," but we're just doing the equivalent of saying "maybe they purposefully designed bad mechanics and these mechanics are bad, thus they succeeded, so it's a success!"
Don't bother. This is taking the design from bad to worse.
Now you're not only limiting combat design, but you're limiting exploration and interaction. Providing an unbeatable challenge is crap, so that's out. Our intrepid heroes must now explore and interact only in situations where one competent person could succeed, or at least one competent person and three idiots.
Who gets to be the idiots? Everyone but Charlie, apparently. (or everyone but our 5th 'interactive' example.)
All this design does is transfer our problems in either extremely restrictive design or intentionally excluding players to every other part of the mechanics. It's bad design for combat, it's bad design for everything else, too.
Historically, this design hasn't worked out for any game. Ever. It doesn't last because it's crap design.
Actually it was a pretty good game all around. Most of the places it was awful were the places where they held over flawed design from previous editions, or simply forgot to do their math properly, or decided "O NOES, PAIZO TOOK OUR CUSTOMERZ Y'ALL," and rolled back to awful design decisions in the name of nostalgia.
And here we come to the absolute crux of the problems with this post.
Specializing in "one pillar" at the expense of others is awful. If I gather 6 people around my table for four hours, under no circumstances should I be able to average having only 4 present with no noticeable change in play. That's the end result of this design. "Combat heavy game tonight Charlie, would you like to borrow my Game Boy?" You don't balance them against each other, you balance them discretely. Just as the convention of "roles" was applied in 4e to help balance out combat contribution by providing specializations that worked together but in very different ways, an implementation of similar design precepts to interaction/exploration in which everyone contributes in specific and necessary but different ways is an excellent design goal. It need not be as formalized and mechanically involved as combat is (and really should not be) but it should maintain the concept of everyone's contribution being necessary at all times.
That way, genuinely excellent ideas like: become a wonderful way to add variety, rather than the only way to keep Charlie meaningfully involved.
http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/12/06/dd_next_qa:_racial_stats,_expertise_dice__skills
Holy shit.
"Look, you may find combat boring, that's okay, because at least it goes fast. We understand that you just want our dull swingy bullshit to be over as quickly as possible! We've got you covered. While we're on it, you're right, we basically said "fuck balancing combat options", we intend to steer you down the path of just deal damage, because we have fuck-all ideas on how to introduce interesting combat options into our rickety shit design mantra of "just relate all combat situations to advantage/disadvantage". So if you find a case where you actually found value in the non-damage options, you should feel good about yourself because you did what the designers of the game could not."
"Oh, and the races have little reason to be changed, because it's not like humans are ubermensch or anything."
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
That about sums it up.
All that follows is highly anecdotal, and I do not in any represent it as universal.
My switch to 4e was... troubled. One of my group in particular was dead set against switching and the result was a 30 year old man--otherwise a respectable adult--threw a tantrum in my living room and made 5 other players exceptionally uncomfortable.
The next time we tried it (sans that player and his wife) people had a great time. When they talked about it later to that person, what they remarked most on was the combat. His immediate reaction (and immediate point the next time we talked about anything) was that 4e must be nothing but combat!
We actually had one combat. It was intended to be a big deal, and took a while, but we spent less of the night engaged in semi-mindless violence than anything else by far. I had players tell me how much they loved the NPCs and where they thought the story was going, and spent about two hours hanging out after the game just trying to pry secrets out of me and speculating on the story, so it obviously wasn't the only thing they liked.
So why mention the fight? Because at our table good story was a given. We've been pretty lucky in that our group has some excellent storytellers. But combat was usually a giant hassle. It was either "wait cast the right spell and it's immediately over" or "two hour grind fest because no one has the right spell, and any other kind of combat takes forever." A fun fight was an exceptional and new thing for us.
4e combat didn't always work. It needed refinement, and I won't say otherwise--it was hard to create genuine skirmishes, Solo design was an excellent idea but the initial implementation was off and the later implementation was wonky. Nothing scaled right, and a lot of options were a lot better than some of the others, (by 4e standards... by any other edition, they were astonishingly close.) and it needed ways to keep all the players involved off turn instead of just the defender. (Mark/reprisal system was genius in that regard) But it was a lot better than the alternatives.
All of the apologist crap in the QA/LL column has got me wondering... What game were these guys playing?
Since I do not believe I have actually taken something out of context (nor has anyone backed their accusation with a specific example of such) I don't think that's a fair argument to levy against me.
If 40% of your game is something you need to rush through you've fucked up.
If that same 40% is where your actual product is primarily applied....you've really fucked up.
http://revolution21days.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/why-d-has-lots-of-rules-for-combat.html
You could argue its war gaming roots would tie the game to combat but it's pretty clear that d&d became something different soon after its birth from chainmail.
SoogaGames Blog
Oh sorry, I should have been clearer. I wasn't accusing you of that!
The Playtest Caves of Chaos certainly had some bizarre mechanics for finding traps and I think my brain deliberately blocked out the jumping rules.
SoogaGames Blog
Mostly, but noncombat stuff in D&D, be they skills, social mechanics, or whatever, have never been done particularly well. At best, they've been functional, at worst, well, you have pixel-bitching with the DM.
The presence of Pixel Bitching is something almost entirely unrelated to the mechanics of a game. It's much more linked to GM advice and adventure design. Advise the GM how to avoid it and give example adventures where it's not likely to occur and there's not much more you can do.
It might seem like having a Spot or Search mechanic would remove this, but as soon as the party fail that roll to find the vital object then you're in the same situation as if you had no skill mechanics at all. I don't use Skills and I'm very happy with how searching, sneaking and social activity works in my games.
As for social mechanics, I think the Reaction Table is something sorely missing from recent editions.
SoogaGames Blog
That's where design matters.
And of course, there are lots more of us average GMs than the maladjusted fuckmuppets or the bardic geniuses.
Also, as an old man with kid and job to take care of, I might be able to find my hidden bardic genius, had I the time. But I don't. So I don't have time to balance your game for you, WOTC. I have time to GM semi-improv narrativist games, because they don't expect me to have unlimited free time.
SoogaGames Blog
I've gotten extreme pushback suggesting more or less the same when suggesting games that are better for RP.