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Xand_Man posted:Some of it's a holdover from D&D's wargaming roots where a wizard was supposed to be a glass cannon artillery piece. You could still sort of see it in follower mechanics: Fighters, paladins, etc. got followers because as a UNIT they'd be comparable to a high-level wizard casting stuff like fireball I think this is still a pretty viable way to approach it. You can create a setting where wizard characters are more "special" than the average individual person in the setting while still allowing non-wizard players similar levels of involvement in the game through mechanics that aren't just magic attained by getting really swole. In many systems and settings having followers, friends in high places, stacks of cash, positions of authority, etc. are perfectly viable counters to actually being a wizard yourself.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:17
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Most Jrpgs have always had sword fighter as the central most important person that is smarter and nicer and better than everyone else.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:. Funny thing is how Gygax and Arneson created D&D from a sword and sorcery background, the kinds of stories where wizards were creepy puppetmasters who got their poo poo wrecked as soon as Conan or whoever confronted them face to face. I read an early newsletter article by Gygax I think explaining how D&D wizards are so much more capable than their fictional counterparts specifically so they wouldn't be useless. Edit: Though also back when the only two classes were "Fighting man" and "Magic user" fighters also got all the mundane abilities like wilderness skills and what later became thief abilities.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:31
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Killer robot posted:Funny thing is how Gygax and Arneson created D&D from a sword and sorcery background, the kinds of stories where wizards were creepy puppetmasters who got their poo poo wrecked as soon as Conan or whoever confronted them face to face. I read an early newsletter article by Gygax I think explaining how D&D wizards are so much more capable than their fictional counterparts specifically so they wouldn't be useless. The other problem is that wizard is like literally nine classes worth of spells all at once, it’s ridiculously flexible, far more so than any newly designed class should be. Specialist mages (where wizards pick a subsection to be really good at and another subsection they can’t do nearly as well or at all) help with this a lot, but there’s a ton of narrative and game design inertia around a “universal” wizard who can do all of them, so the full stupid flexible wizard is pretty much something D&D is stuck with. Even 4e didn’t touch it. The breadth of the generic universal wizard wasn’t really a problem or obvious until 2e AD&D, but it was very obvious then. There’s a lot of 2e supplements with differently focused kinds of wizards.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:37
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Mundrial Mantis posted:3E coinciding with rise of the modern internet doesn't get talked about enough. I always wonder if there was something about online forums and 3E's rules that lead to dissections of the rules and game design, along with character optimization and unexpected builds. So the core of 3E players learned the rules among the dozens of splatbooks which sorta leads to a sunk cost. Without making an overlong TG-style post about how it all works, 3E character theorycrafting involves planning everything the character will do from levels 1-20+ because of how levels stack on top of each other for requirements purposes, often fudging assumptions about rules interactions that won't actually work if interpreted honestly by the reader, or generous assumptions about what their DM will actually tolerate in play (or read to check whether it's even technically allowed). There's no real design model for how powerful anything should be at any given level, so the mechanical interactions between two classes that were developed in isolation from each other are unbound. It's basically the perfect theorycrafting black box for nerds to plunge into.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:57
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Without making an overlong TG-style post about how it all works, 3E character theorycrafting involves planning everything the character will do from levels 1-20+ because of how levels stack on top of each other for requirements purposes, often fudging assumptions about rules interactions that won't actually work if interpreted honestly by the reader, or generous assumptions about what their DM will actually tolerate in play (or read to check whether it's even technically allowed). There's no real design model for how powerful anything should be at any given level, so the mechanical interactions between two classes that were developed in isolation from each other are unbound. Yes, but the internet offering a community for that theorycrafting to happen in significantly changed how D&D 3e (and games descended from it) were played and designed for. The old “CharOp” (Character Optimization) forum on the WotC forums was infamous for warping how discussion of the game worked, and a lot of what people consider common terms for discussing those editions (class tiers, crunch vs. fluff, et cetera) came from those boards. WotC designers were pretty upfront about how the feedback they were getting from online communities influenced how they wrote new sourcebooks and created new material for the game, eventually leading to Orcus (what became the Book of Nine Swords for 3e) and then 4e itself. It is positively stark how different products were during 3e’s lifetime, the design and writing of 3.0 and its supplements is miles away from what happened in late 3.5. (And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I’d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision.) Tons and tons of nerd factionalism. e: in contrast to the 3e community’s focus on “builds”, most 5e posts are “look at how cool my bisexual disaster tiefling bard is”, and most OSR community discussion is “look at this cool new tool I came up with for GMs and how I used it in the last session I ran.” No opinions which is better or worse, but the game editions definitely lead to different kinds of excited discussions.
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Nov 8, 2021 02:04
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Arivia posted:Yes, but the internet offering a community for that theorycrafting to happen in significantly changed how D&D 3e (and games descended from it) were played and designed for. The old “CharOp” (Character Optimization) forum on the WotC forums was infamous for warping how discussion of the game worked, and a lot of what people consider common terms for discussing those editions (class tiers, crunch vs. fluff, et cetera) came from those boards. WotC designers were pretty upfront about how the feedback they were getting from online communities influenced how they wrote new sourcebooks and created new material for the game, eventually leading to Orcus (what became the Book of Nine Swords for 3e) and then 4e itself. It is positively stark how different products were during 3e’s lifetime, the design and writing of 3.0 and its supplements is miles away from what happened in late 3.5. (And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I’d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision.) This is mainly to my mind because 5E charop is by comparison so boring that there's barely anything to discuss. "Hi guys, nice to meet you. I've brought a character named Dip Warlock."
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Nov 8, 2021 03:59
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I kind of wish, instead of making casters weaker, they'd given the nonmagic classes a team/holy see/guild/platoon to lead. Maybe wizards could have a tower to make it feel fair while explaining where this extra power is coming from. Just last night I was reading a book with that solution, I think it was Low Fantasy Gaming.
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Nov 8, 2021 04:13
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Ragnar34 posted:I kind of wish, instead of making casters weaker, they'd given the nonmagic classes a team/holy see/guild/platoon to lead. Maybe wizards could have a tower to make it feel fair while explaining where this extra power is coming from. Just last night I was reading a book with that solution, I think it was Low Fantasy Gaming. This was a mechanic in earlier editions of D&D. All classes got followers of various types at a certain point, with wizards getting a few apprentices and fighters getting a platoon of men-at-arms, ect.
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Nov 8, 2021 04:17
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fool of sound posted:This was a mechanic in earlier editions of D&D. All classes got followers of various types at a certain point, with wizards getting a few apprentices and fighters getting a platoon of men-at-arms, ect. I really liked that in Rogue Trader you could either be Captain Kirk beaming down with the bridge crew and a redshirt or two, or else Zapp Brannigan sending in wave after wave of your own men, or anything in between, including the killbots.
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Nov 8, 2021 04:24
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fool of sound posted:This was a mechanic in earlier editions of D&D. All classes got followers of various types at a certain point, with wizards getting a few apprentices and fighters getting a platoon of men-at-arms, ect. This is also how the "get experience points for finding gold" mechanic originally worked. You didn't get XP directly for money, but rather for non-adventuring expenditures during downtime. Again, like the old sword and sorcery stories where you get sacks of loot at the end of each plot, then at the beginning of the next story you drank and partied yourself broke and want more money. That worked okay at early levels, but once you get powerful and the stakes get higher it's hard to justify and you start pouring the money into building a castle/church/guild/tower and the organization to support it.
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Nov 8, 2021 04:25
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fool of sound posted:This was a mechanic in earlier editions of D&D. All classes got followers of various types at a certain point, with wizards getting a few apprentices and fighters getting a platoon of men-at-arms, ect. Spellcasting types can also generally recruit monsters of various kinds. BECMI (the last version of Basic for those unaware) has the best version, where fighters can choose to become paladins and get an order of knights, or avengers who build their own dungeons and get an army of monsters. Killer robot posted:This is also how the "get experience points for finding gold" mechanic originally worked. You didn't get XP directly for money, but rather for non-adventuring expenditures during downtime. Again, like the old sword and sorcery stories where you get sacks of loot at the end of each plot, then at the beginning of the next story you drank and partied yourself broke and want more money. This isn't quite true. XP is mostly received for treasure safely recovered from the dungeon in OD&D/1e/Basic, with some minor suggestions about XP for gold spent in places like the 1e AD&D DMG. The idea of carousing as a game mechanic (XP for gold absolutely fuckin wasted on partying) wasn't anything more than the most minor of suggestions until Jeff Rients (an influential OSR blogger) fleshed it out into a whole system in 2009.
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Nov 8, 2021 05:10
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Ragnar34 posted:I kind of wish, instead of making casters weaker, they'd given the nonmagic classes a team/holy see/guild/platoon to lead. Maybe wizards could have a tower to make it feel fair while explaining where this extra power is coming from. Just last night I was reading a book with that solution, I think it was Low Fantasy Gaming. That was a major thing early on, but basically no one really liked dealing with 30 nameless nobodies milling around outside battle
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Nov 8, 2021 05:51
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From TG's Industry thread, about that Jacobin piece:FMguru posted:The author, Leonard Pierce, lost his writing gig at the AV Club a decade ago because he submitted a review for a book that hadn't even been published yet.
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Nov 8, 2021 09:07
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Honestly, early edition D&D wizards were overpowered because most people ignored all of the built-in limitations. V,S,M? Whatever, I cast fireball, who cares if I have a piece of random bat poo poo in one of my pockets. Hell yeah I'm casting haste every goddamn fight, who cares if it ages the recipient a year with each casting. I need to spend 18 hours sitting in this dank, smelly-rear end dungeon poindextering it up with my spell book while my buddies all sit around playing cards and making GBS threads in the corner waiting for me? Bah, rise and grind, lets get dem GP. Oh poo poo, a completely normal housecat, my one weakness!
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Nov 8, 2021 15:14
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If you use the casters' downsides, the player can't have fun! That's why the martial characters' downsides are baked in. You can be baseline competent infinite times a day. The caster can only outshine you X times a day (before deciding it's time to rest and reset that timer.) It's also always been a sticking point (for me at least) that a martial character one-shotting a foe is impossible. A thing that has occured throughout the history of conflict simply cannot happen in D&D. It's also why some editions of martial D&D characters couldn't accomplish feats regularly achieved by professional athletes.
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Nov 8, 2021 15:34
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How much of an issue of Caster Supremacy is due to "We ignore the downsides of spells in the name of fun" and how much was due to changing the spell save system to being "There are three categories of saves, you excel at one and suck at one" and then expanding the casters list with stuff that target specific saves rather than generic "This character/monster is especially resilient to magic, you have a 30% of your non-damaging spell sticking" that was in older editions? It has been awhile since I looked at D&D/AD&D, but I remember the spell saves being very generous to fighters at higher levels.
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Nov 8, 2021 15:40
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I feel like the question of how unbalanced they actually are in gameplay is less interesting than the stuff around it. D&D has evil wizards and strong fighters, but does have a much stronger theme of a really weird idea that being physically fitter makes you less human and is dehumanizing, while academic magic makes you overall a better more perfected human. Like in contrast to a lot of fiction where magic twists you and physical prowess is the ideal form D&D goes hard on physical strength is beastly, and mental strength comes along with just general betterment in all things.
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Nov 8, 2021 16:21
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It isn't just that casters can be better at combat than the martial classes, it's that their power affects all aspects of the game and scales to the point where full casters have spells that can warp reality. Martial classes just scale better damage. And classes that are martial but get supernatural abilities (think monk) get high level abilities that aren't crazy powerful compared to spells like wish. Digging though the 3.5 SRD, I'm actually surprised the level 19 monk ability Empty Body is based on a level 9 spell, though it doesn't seem particularly powerful. Also, looking at the spells, I'm reminded of how much I hated how spells were written. They may have been flavorful, but it was so frustrating digging through the spells trying to figure out exactly what spells did. Especially when it was mid-combat and I was trying to decide what to do. Maybe that ties back into the Smart, Perfect Casters vs Dumb, Brutish Fighters. Long, arcane texts as the mark of intelligence. And it wasn't just spells, combat in 3E (and 4E, I haven't played much 5E) could just drag on forever. It's a big reason I love to play rules light systems these days.
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Nov 8, 2021 16:52
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I think early on, one of the things that limited wizards was the whole Vancian casting. The wizard, for instance, has the spell Knock, which lets him unlock any normal or magically locked door. So in that sense, he's better than the thief, who can pick locks with a percentage chance of success. The problem is, though, once the wizard has cast the spell, he's lost it until the next day when he can learn it again, while the thief can pick locks all day. And that limits the wizard in a lot of ways.....sure there's a spell that can do what non-wizards can do, but probably better, but it can only be used once. The other thing about early D&D is that, for first level spells, at least, they were randomized. So you could be in a situation where your first level wizard had 1-4 hit points, couldn't wear any armor, could only attack people with a dagger, and your spells were read magic and Tenser's Floating Disk (a magical disk that you could create to put stuff on), which really doesn't do you too much good when the goblins attack. The caster supremacy thing became a real problem, as I see it, in 3-3.5, and part of the problem was not entirely intention, but due to the number of books that came out causing weird synergies. I play clerics a lot, and to give you a cleric example, clerics gain the ability to turn or destroy undead for a number of times a day (and the number of times go up as the level increases). It's a good ability, but it's also situational. If you're not fighting undead, you're not going to use it. There's a magical item in one of the books that lets you, I think, triple your turn undead "slots" per day. Now one of the things 3 introduced was metamagic. Metamagic is the ability to adjust the spells you cast in exchange for changing the effective level of the spell. So you might be able to cast a spell and its affects last longer than usual, or it has increased range, or it automatically does maximum damage, and so on. As a cost to doing this, the spells cast with metamagic are a higher effective level than they are normally. So, if I cast what would normally be a level 3 spell, it becomes a level 4 spell or even a level 5 spell. So there's another magical item available to clerics that lets you spend turn undead slots to cancel out metamagic costs. The metamagic spell that got hiked up to level 5 from level 3 is level 3 again. So, if I have those two items, I can get a whole lot of turn undead chances and just cast metamagic spells like crazy. It's gamey, and I hope my DM would slap me if I tried it, but as the rules are written, there's nothing stopping me.
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Nov 8, 2021 17:27
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Arivia posted:Spellcasting types can also generally recruit monsters of various kinds. BECMI (the last version of Basic for those unaware) has the best version, where fighters can choose to become paladins and get an order of knights, or avengers who build their own dungeons and get an army of monsters. Well, that's the other thing; people ignore the concept-as-written for martial classes. IN AD&D 2e, how many DMs actually bust out old PHB Table 16 when Mr Fighter hits level 9, and suddenly finds himself with an army? Or Table 19, when Mr. Ranger might suddenly find himself with a flock of hippgriffs or a fuckton of bears following them around? Or 10th level thieves who suddenly find themselves running a fair-sized gang/guild? Nope. Mr. Wizard learns how to bend time and space, while Mr. Fighter is still travelling from inn to inn, looking at the quest board and living hand to mouth while being decked out with magical gear. Now, BECMI was very VERY explicit that the game radically changes as you move up the boxes; Basic has you doing scrub jobs, Expert has you 'adventuring,' Companion has you settling down and carving out a kingdom, Master has you juggling your kingdom and world-altering quests, and I loved the idea of Immortal letting you ascend to godhood. AD&D has the same system, but doesn't really impose it on you the way BECMI did.
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Nov 8, 2021 17:45
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TheCenturion posted:Well, that's the other thing; people ignore the concept-as-written for martial classes. Not gonna lie, if I was playing a Fighter to that level, I would expect my dang army or magical menagerie. That being said, I've never actually played in any campaign that lasted long enough to get past level... 5, and only experienced high-level games as convention one-offs, where the characters were made by the DM.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:02
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Another important factor in early D&D was the notion of the Party Leader, or (at even stricter tables) the Caller. At many tables (maybe most), there was an implicit understanding that someone in the party would be doing most of the talking to the DM, whether that was making the final decision on what the party was going to do in the dungeon, or being the face of the party to NPCs. In both cases this job would tend to go to the fighter player--as the front liner they'd the the one literally leading the way through the dungeon, and when it came to interactions with NPCs, the Fighter was both a normal man and effectively a noble-in-waiting making him a natural choice to do the talking to the innkeeper, farmer or local baron, who were the ones giving you most of the quests. That gave you quite a bit to do as a fighter in either situation, and it also gave you a certain level of investment in the rest of the party such that their power was also partly your power. But with the advent of bluff and diplomacy checks in 3e, it was much more in your interest to have your highest charisma player doing the talking, which would almost certainly not be the Fighter.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:47
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TheCenturion posted:Well, that's the other thing; people ignore the concept-as-written for martial classes. This is another issue with 3E in that every class is expressed in totality as a table you can make in Microsoft Word, not a detailed, interesting thing that does something besides Increase Number.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:18
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Just going to drop this in here because I was reminded of it the other day: https://twitter.com/lindsaaaytweets/status/1278335484041838592 The above bizarre biological determinism is how races have been typically written and treated in D&D. I cannot tell you how much this reminds of most D&D books in how they describe race.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:15
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Arivia posted:And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I’d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision. And I meant to address this earlier, but the design model throughout the lifespan of 3E is notoriously tummyfeels. There's no banded math and often no math. Monster challenge rating math for example was never described because it didn't exist, everything just ended up with what amounted to an approximation of what they thought the monster was for, but in practice if the math even existed it wouldn't matter because the casters could obviate anything. Designer biases were all over every class, and throughout the lifetime of the game it rewarded players who created multiclass abominations rather than those who labored under the sensible but incorrect idea that anything was mathematically balanced or even meant to be as rewarding as everything else. E: Did not actually mean to triple post
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Nov 8, 2021 21:23
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Just going to drop this in here because I was reminded of it the other day: The big thing here is that "race" in biological terms means something totally different than its come to mean sociologically. So elves as a race, separate and distinct from humans, having infravision and not requiring conventional sleep is a totally ok thing. But eveything on that page is 100% hosed up.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:54
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Race in fantasy can get....weird, because you can get races/species/whatever you prefer that are literally created by a literal God and things can get weird because of that. For example, 5e gnolls.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:31
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Yeah, they're called "races" but in fantasy worlds they're often supposed to be nearly separate species. Not just different cultures, but literal biological differences. Tieflings got horns, Dragonborn breathe fire, Warforged are literal robots. It's not supposed to analogous to skintone in the real world, and some later D&D actually made an effort to depict a range of features. A lot of fantasy doesn't really dig deep to examine what it means to live in a world with a bunch of wildly different forms of sentient life, but back in Lord of the Rings there was kind of a cosmological difference between elves and men (and hobbits) having to do with mortality and the fate of their souls, dwarves were some other god's weird project, Ents are a totally alien form of civilization, and then there's just sentient animals like the Eagles hanging around. But then there's stuff like "halflings get +2 to thievery" which is no good. People want to get a lot of mechanical bonuses and features from every step of character creation, and things get thrown in without thinking about it. And that's not even getting into the whole thing where some races have default alignments that can be extrapolated to unfortunate places.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:54
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I think when it comes to racism almost all table top RPGs share the trait of being as weird as possible about asians.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:39
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poll plane variant posted:I think this is still a pretty viable way to approach it. You can create a setting where wizard characters are more "special" than the average individual person in the setting while still allowing non-wizard players similar levels of involvement in the game through mechanics that aren't just magic attained by getting really swole. In many systems and settings having followers, friends in high places, stacks of cash, positions of authority, etc. are perfectly viable counters to actually being a wizard yourself. This is something that gets lost from older iterations of the game. Like the wizard gets super powerful so they can cast fireball often or power word kill or whatever, the fighters getting powerful means he can ride around a town for a day and then roll back up with a small army (by D&D party standards) to storm a place. I played 2E D&D games like like that in high school where being charismatic/diplomatic was very useful for a fighter for like you say, once you're renowned being able to actually just roll up to NPCs/powerful folks and say "hey XYZ lich is in this castle we gotta get'em" and have that result in very tangible physical support was cool. So the fighter had as many vectors to interact with the world as the magic user and could exert serious long term narrative changes to the story with a conversation, or getting one place's move en masse in a given direction. It especially worked well since back then the fighter would often be the at the point head/sort of leader of the group. Telsa Cola posted:Race in fantasy can get....weird, because you can get races/species/whatever you prefer that are literally created by a literal God and things can get weird because of that. I liked how 4E Shadowrun handled this because racism as we know it now didn't go away or get transferred 1:1 to the other species, they have it take place further in the future where some metahumans would say they're [nationality or/and human ethnicity] before they would say they're an orc. Also did some cool stuff with some of the things that were "monsters" previously being legally recognized as part of metahumanity and you could even play as them. Shadowrun stumbles quite a bit too in some ways but I liked the direction they were attempting in 4E.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think when it comes to racism almost all table top RPGs share the trait of being as weird as possible about asians. I was considering writing something to praise the Runequest approach to fantasy races/species, but Land of Ninja exists, so fair enough.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:53
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I guess I was thinking more that you can have a god of thieves or whatever that decides to create a race and everyone in that race is a thieving dickbag not through some intrinsic moral failure but that they are cosmologically purposed to steal poo poo.
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Nov 9, 2021 01:34
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Telsa Cola posted:I guess I was thinking more that you can have a god of thieves or whatever that decides to create a race and everyone in that race is a thieving dickbag not through some intrinsic moral failure but that they are cosmologically purposed to steal poo poo. These are fundamentally weird worlds, in our world, humans were created by God to sort of just dick around and hopefully eventually come to Jesus, and run into some angels and evil demonic entities and stuff along the way. In fantasy settings, there's like a hundred gods and they're all making purpose-built species for various tasks.
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Nov 9, 2021 04:25
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it's also interesting because if you think about it, in our world gods operate on faith. but in D&D, there's no faith required because Pelor or Gruumsh or Garl Glittergold are literally dudes you can just go visit. so like, how do churches even operate? you gotta be a lot more transactional in your operations when your followers can just go worship a different God down the street if the Raven Queen doesn't sufficiently increase harvest yields
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Nov 9, 2021 04:42
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Sodomy Hussein posted:And I meant to address this earlier, but the design model throughout the lifespan of 3E is notoriously tummyfeels. There's no banded math and often no math. Monster challenge rating math for example was never described because it didn't exist, everything just ended up with what amounted to an approximation of what they thought the monster was for, but in practice if the math even existed it wouldn't matter because the casters could obviate anything. This is incorrect. There wasn't banded math (as in math designed to have specific boundaries of high and low values) because that wasn't what WotC designed the system to have. There is a lot of math, but it's frequently obscured and hard to find. For example, there are monster creation guidelines including a table of possible Challenge Ratings - but they're not in the 3.0 core rulebooks, it's an article by Skip Williams in Dragon #276 (October 2000, so the same month as the Monster Manual itself). Most of a page in the 3.5 MM (page 302, to be specific) is dedicated to gauging, estimating, and playtesting a monster's Challenge Rating. There are internal math structures to a lot of stuff in 3e/3.5/PF, from character creation to class design to treasure distribution and monsters. All of it. There's very little where the game throws its hands up and goes "i dunno, you do what feels right." The problem is that those tools didn't reflect how many people played the game, especially after online character optimization became a trend, and therefore those tools don't effectively challenge or balance for how many people ended up playing the game. Like, you probably didn't think there's math for creating monsters of a specific challenge rating because the way you construct monsters in 3e isn't actually solving for creating monsters of a specific challenge. It's instead asking you to create a monster with a specific thematic idea, of a specific size, that is of a general strength you choose. This is how monster design worked prior to the 3.5 emphasis on balanced encounters - you created monsters and challenges as if they filled ecological niches, like a food web where dragons ate your hyperbeast but your hyperbeast chowed down on blink dogs in turn. And there's significant material in the 3.0 core rulebooks (especially the DMG) to facilitate these kinds of play, with effort spent on creating wilderness encounters and travel in ways 3.5 just dropped (and the 3.5 rulebooks are significantly larger, making cuts was a deliberate choice). The Dragon magazine article by Skip Williams that I mentioned fits this model - it's naturalistic design of choosing a type of creature (like dragon or animal), its size, and then comparing it to other monsters after you've completed it to figure out where it fits in. It adds effective hit dice to the creature's actual hit dice to get an estimated challenge rating, which is the same model used going back to Basic and 1e AD&D (in those it looks like HD 8+1*** but it's the same idea) So WotC had models of play and models of design that were effective for years for D&D and it built 3.0 using those. The audience changed, the kinds of games played changed, and the game needed to change with them to still be exciting and challenging. But they couldn't redo everything, so, yes, 3.5 has huge gaps in balance and effectiveness and challenge from things they couldn't change in a revision that was supposed to be largely compatible with what came before it (and was mostly successful in that compatibility). That's a far, far cry from there being no math or no published guidelines or even no attempt to balance things in 3e. Those are all factually incorrect. The balance didn't end up playing well for many people, but WotC did try, and did give people tools to do it. They were just severely unaware and underprepared for what the first edition post-2000 would look like in terms of audience response and analysis, and they didn't design for that. We mentioned that fighters should have armies, and that's something 3.0 allowed for; 3.5 largely drops it (you go from "get an army for your 6th level ability [Leadership feat] and use these rules about the classic mid-high level play arc, with stronghold design and the like" to "get Leadership, here's your cohort (a second, slightly weaker PC) which is the only part that really matters, actual wars don't care about your followers, please use miniatures rules for that"). It is absolutely staggering when you read it closely how much closer to "old-school" D&D 3.0 really was, and how much of a break 3.5 made to facilitate the play people were participating in. (And for those unfamiliar with all of this, the designers' eventual fresh new modern balanced take on D&D with no compatibility concerns was 4e, and it had some birthing pains but ended up pretty drat great for purpose. Do give it a try if you haven't yet, it's a blast.)
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Nov 9, 2021 05:08
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Shrecknet posted:it's also interesting because if you think about it, in our world gods operate on faith. I don't think a lot of proselytizing happens or at least not majorly. Most churches operate as bases of operations or focal points for rituals or whatever. Besides, assuming people stick with one main God they worship or whatever its likely going to be profession or lifestyle based in most cases because their are tangible benefits to their worship. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 05:36
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Randalor posted:How much of an issue of Caster Supremacy is due to "We ignore the downsides of spells in the name of fun" and how much was due to changing the spell save system to being "There are three categories of saves, you excel at one and suck at one" and then expanding the casters list with stuff that target specific saves rather than generic "This character/monster is especially resilient to magic, you have a 30% of your non-damaging spell sticking" that was in older editions? Remember there were multiple save categories prior to 3e, but they focused on what kind of effect you were saving against, not how you resisted it. So the classes have saves they're better and worse at, but most saves against spells were in the general "saves against spells" category, which fighter types were better at overall than the "good save/bad save" model of 3e. I mentioned it in my last post, but one of the frequent criticisms against 3e these days is that it didn't have "banded math" - everything is a d20 + modifiers against a target number you need to meet or exceed, and the modifiers and the target number keep getting bigger and bigger. There's no real point where you can go "oh, hey, this is just universally good or protective against this effect" when it engages with the basic math of the system. In contrast, most things prior to 3e were banded in some way or another - AC bottoms out around -10 (with lower being infamously better, so negative 10 was GREAT) and your to hit system (THAC0) also hits a effective banded ending to match, same with saving throws and damage and so on. The problem with this was that publications and long-lasting campaigns would get up to near the bounds of the system and the game just turned to crap - everyone can hit everyone or no one, spells always or never work, that kind of stuff. If you look at the extremities of the pre-3e systems, so the Master rules of Basic (let's not even talk about Immortals) and the High-Level Campaigns book for 2e, both have extended replacement tables for basic game mechanics that end up with some absurd footnote corner case poo poo. What happens when a 36th level fighter attacks an AC 9 regular person in Master Set Basic? They roll to hit, the roll doesn't matter unless it's 1 in which case they miss, and they add 8 extra damage because their attack bonus effectively overflowed on the table. (Disclaimer for turbonerds: I used the Rules Cyclopedia table because I knew where to find it easier, it's mostly the same thing.) How does your high-level fighter save against my high-level wizard spell in 2e? Well we need to compare our levels and the level of the spell, then check the table to get your adjusted saving throw number, and you need to roll above that but don't forget the inherent penalty because it's a ninth level spell, this only came into effect at like 14th level because before that you weren't high level and didn't need to worry about any of this stuff. These problems also affected earlier levels - thieves from the same edition of Basic as the Master Set are infamously worse than thieves in the previous editions of Basic because their basic functions (a percentage chance to do something capped at 100% for most things) needed to be stretched out over 36 levels now, so they start lower and advance slower. TSR/WotC still received letters and playtesting data (from their organized play campaigns of the time) that went "hey, this sucks" a lot. If you think recent rules debates from the last 20 years of D&D poo poo is confusing, I invite you to look at pre-2000 Sage Advice columns in Dragon magazine and try not to go insane. I remember one where Skip Williams was explaining how to calculate the volcanic activity in a generic fantasy village, because the Volcanic Potential Points (VPPs) or whatever were an essential component of some spell someone was trying to cast and they were fighting with their DM on how likely it was they could blow Fucktown, Nowheresville up with a spontaneous volcano. When 3e was announced and went through playtesting and public comment, WotC did a year long series of columns going over the changes in Dragon magazine and when they talked about the new basic D&D mechanic it was "hey, look, this math doesn't make you want to kill yourself just trying to fight someone. it doesn't require a giant table (or a literal paper rotating wheel for calculations, TSR sold these for YEARS) to just figure out what happens. This is so much incredibly better and fun to play." And they intentionally positioned it as being better for high-level play, as WotC's president at the time (Peter Adkison) loved high-level D&D games. In other words, getting rid of banded math was seen as an incredible leap forward in accessibility and simplicity of play for 3e. It was not supported with enough mathematical rigor to be air-tight or not perfectly great all the time, but it was a reasonable and thoughtful advancement of D&D's mechanics and math to respond to existing problems with the game. You mentioned spell resistance, and that is a pretty good example of what happened. Spell resistance in 2e is a binary percentage chance - 50% chance (or whatever, it changes from monster to monster) the monster isn't affected by a spell. In 3e it's the same core mechanic as everything else - the caster rolls a d20 and adds modifiers (their wizard/cleric/etc level, the level of the spell, et cetera) versus a target number for each creature (this target number is larger the stronger the creature gets, effectively). Same as with saving throws and attack rolls, there are weird corner case rules in Master set Basic and High-Level Campaigns to make high-level characters more effective versus lower-level monsters with spell resistance. Same as with saving throws, it's possible for a 3e character to be built in such a way they can trivially crush most spell resistance checks and be effective against any monster. The effect ends up being a little different though - prior to 3e, spell resistance was a road block. Because it was banded, most spell resistant monsters just no-sold spells and kept going. In 3e it's more of a speed bump, it slows you down and sometimes diverts things but it's not really meant to be a complete stop, and WotC did realize this and treat it differently. Monsters that are supposed to be immune to specific things in 3e just have actual immunities stated - golems, for example, are immune to all magic except for like 4 spells each. (Other changes in how 3e does things mean that the golem may be immune but the stuff around it isn't, so you just destroy the floor underneath it and keep it stuck in a pit it can't climb out of.) e: the point I'm trying to make overall in this post and the last one is that 3e might feel bad and like it was poorly designed and no one actually cared to do the math right, but it was actually well designed and people did do a lot of math and playtesting for it. There was a seismic shift in how RPGs were played immediately afterwards with mass Internet access, there was a huge advancement in how RPG rules were designed and tested that I think 3e honestly did a lot to facilitate (because you're not finding great banded math tightly balanced RPG systems prior to August 2000), and everything changed around it. But 3e was not regressive or lazy or intentionally bad (in comparison to 5e, for example) - it was a fundamental reimagining of D&D, the biggest revision up until that point, and worked very hard to respond to the problems people were actually having with their D&D games when it was in development. It doesn't play well now, sure, it has definitely been made obsolete by new editions of D&D and other games since, absolutely, and it is missing a lot of the rigor people expect from combat-emphasis RPGs today: but none of that was in effect when the game itself was being created, tested, and introduced. Arivia fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 05:36
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Shrecknet posted:it's also interesting because if you think about it, in our world gods operate on faith. Do they? I think divinity is a much more complicated and culture-dependent thing - ironically, what you're doing here is D&Ding our world. For example, Greek gods got tributes because if not they would gently caress you up. They wanted you to worship them because they were entitled to it, you piece of poo poo mortal, not because they needed it. They didn't care about belief in some Christian sense.
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Nov 9, 2021 06:06
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Another story I remember hearing about 3e playtesting not catching spellcaster issues was related to that. It wasn't that 1e/2e casters really lacked for "save or die" spells, but because of how saves worked and fighters/monsters having really good saves at high level, anything negated entirely by a save was going to be hit or miss. While damage spells that were halved by a save would still hurt - and HP was lower across the board in old editions even if the fighter/wizard HP gap was larger. Consequently, playtesters encouraged to try breaking the system tended to focus more on damage spells and other mechanics that had been powerful in 2e. Those seemed okay, but the focus on testing against known issues had distracted from testing for new ones. The end result was that that while they were earnestly looking for balance issues with magic, in a number of cases they were just looking in the wrong place.
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Nov 9, 2021 06:06
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