I'm so surprised that the more modern players agree and the grognards disagree.
I totally agree with the OP. I also think this is "why we can't have nice things", as they say. The current will never accept the same things as the old. We see the old as ridiculous, they see the same thing in what we want.
The more I see this happen, the less I think they can make a game we can all enjoy as a social unit, let alone at the same table playing all together.
The RPG community is not nearly so neatly divided as being either modern players and grognards. Setting up such rediculously simplistic walls does little to foster discussion.
Personally, I am quite happy to play with either a modern rule set or one that was printed way back in the nether days of disco. I cannot help but suspect a great big swath of the RPG community likewise sits in the grey middle.
I disagree strongly with the OP, but I don't feel I can contribute much more than what was already pointed out, other than noticing that all the people who disagree ( and therefore support a more classic D&D style design) are arguing against the points, and the people who agree (supporting a more 4e style approach) are relying on personal attacks.
EDIT: I happed to also notice that every other edition has lasted longer than 4e (the edition whose design principles the OP is parroting), but no, these are principals D&D Next can never violate
I think the takeaway point is that no character should be forced into even temporary irrelevacne by design. It is totally okay if one player/pc dominates a scene due to choices the player makes, luck of the dice, favorable situations crafted by the DM. These are all caused by the players themselves, or at least outside of the rules. The problem comes up when the rules (and class/build design is part of the rules) virtually dictate behavior and capability.
If I make foolish choices (my low HP wizard charges the dragon with a melee attack...), those choices shouldn't be validated by likely success. But choosing to be a bard and expecting to have something to do in a comat situation isn't foolish, nor is being a fighter and expecting to do something relevant when I'm not wearing armor.
It is totally acceptable that my friend the bard won't be as good at meleeing dragons as I, the fighter, can. But it isn't acceptable that my friend the bard should have nothing relevant to do in the inevitable dragon fight just because he's a bard and gets to shine in all the talky bits.
Not feeling useless or not feeling you're wasting your time =/= having to be equal in all situations at all times. It means that your presence at the table matters.
Brings up fond memories of a halfling bard I ran in my only opportunity to play Spelljammer, eventually to become the plucky captain of the ship, in a campaign played back in the days of 2nd edition.
You are correct in that my bard was hardly the combat equal of other party members. Now, it would be an exagerration to say he had nothing relevant to do in combat. He was certainly always involved in combat, but it was clearly not his strong point.
In other areas in the campaign, he was absolutely crucial to the party's success.
To a very large extent, this discussion hinges upon how important a role combat plays in the campaign. If combat is front and center, the dominant portion of the evening's events, overshadowing other factors in the game, then I would agree that each class should have equally balanced and relevant combat abilities.
I simply do not play the game in a manner that combat is such a dominant portion of a campaign. Most any encounter that could be solved through sword and devastating spell could likewise be solved through guile, wit, connections, or charm. If more than, say, 20-25% of a given session's length is spent under the gun of an Initiative roll, my eyes start to glaze over with the boredom befitting of too much time spent on one activity. Whereas, when I am spending some 75-80% of a given session on non-combat, there is ample time for the characters not so militantly focused to shine.
This thread is a prime example of why we can't have nice things and why DDN will likely not garner much support in the end.* Which is unfortunate and sad. Although I still hope for the best.
I'm not even going to go into what I agree and disagree with, as it's a pointless endeavor. The OP has some good points but also several flawed ones (and some good points are backed up with flawed arguments and vice versa).
*DDN will be a camel. For those of you who don't know, a camel is a horse designed by committe.
Some of these principles, and their mechanical implications, are as follows:
First objection: You make some grand statements which sound plausible -and then draw conclusions from those which demonstrate why they are not.
No player should ever feel like they are wasting their time
Disagree: No player should ALWAYS feel like they are wasting their time. But if it happens from time to time, it's neither the problem of the DM nor the game mechanics. Sometimes you need a hammer and sometimes you need a screwdriver. That doesn't mean every tool needs to be tossed in the scrap heap and exchanged for combo hammer-screwdrivers.
No single character should dominate an encounter without the help of the rest of the party, and no character should be useless in an encounter. All characters should have something to contribute in combat, exploration, and roleplaying.
True, for the most part. But this is a statement of absolutes. Sure, characters should not be useless. But I have never seen a charactger actually be useless (OK, outside of 4E skill challenges where it is sometimes better to do nothing than to roll the dice - but that is a flaw with the apecific 4E default skill challenge mechanics). Some characters may contribute greater or lesser amounts to different encounters - and this is how it should be. But not being the star of the encounter is not the same as being useless. Saying that characters should be able to contribute is not equivalent to saying that the contributions should be equal all the time. Sometimes one character should dominate the encounter.
Character classes and builds need to be balanced for both combat and non-combat encounters. The system should not encourage the creation of combat monsters who are useless in non-combat encounters or skill monkeys who can't hold their own in a fight.
Disagree completely. Why are you forcing your opinion about what character builds are viable or valid on other players. If players want to build combat monsters who are useless in non-combat encounters or skill monkeys who can't hold their own in a fight - why shouldn't they be able to.
Resources for combat and non-combat functionality need to come from separate pools.
Ok, you got me. I agree with you on this one. Although I think that the classes need not be equally balanced for both and although I think that it should be possible to put different resources into combat and skills during character creation - I do think that once the character is created the mechanics work better if combat and non-combat abilities are drawn from separate pools. Every class needs at-wills.
OK, I'll agree with this one as well. I'm a bit surprised it took us 40 years to figure this out, but if nothing else 4E has hopefully taught us this.
D&D is a form of cooperative heroic fantasy storytelling as well as a game.
This one is a premise, not a design goal. As such, it sounds promising - but it really doesn't tell us much.
If you can't turn your experience of the game into a good story, then it wasn't a good experience. ...
Here, you have the right idea - but the conclusion you draw from it is wrong (imho, oc). The problem, as I see it, is that you fail to recognize that every good story has its ups and downs, its changes in pacing. Every session need not be a frenetic explosion of player awesomeness. Sometimes the party succeeds - but what they did was fairly routine, sometimes the party even fails. The story is the result of all of these taken together and the resultant awesomeness is made even more awesome if it doesn't automatically happen every session. Any mechanic which encourages the players to treat their characters as disposable is a bad mechanic.
True. But this doesn't lead to:
Player characters should never die meaningless deaths, because when the protagonist of a story dies a meaningless death, it's bad storytelling, and especially bad heroic fantasy.
First, no PC death is ever 'meaningless'. But I assume you really mean no PC should ever have a pointless death. And here I disagree as well. The problem is that you assume that the current PCs are the stars of the story and that therefore they deserve plot immunity. I disagree. I think that the current PCs are better seen as part of an ensemble cast. And, as in many ensemble casts, no individual character is 'the star' - and all are expendable. They can hope for a good finish, or better yet hope to still be on the cast when the story reaches its conclusion. But the story isn't about them - the story is about what this group of characters did together. And sometimes, in an ensemble cast one person gets cut and replaced with another - but the story goes on.
And knowing that your character can die if you are not careful - or even if you are just unlucky - in no way makes characters treat their characters as disposable. In fact, ironically, many report the opposite. For example, in the SoD threads several people have claimed that such lethal mechanisms encourage players to be paranoid and ultra-conservative - hardly the action of someone who sees their character as 'disposeable'. Rather - I'd say that if you see characters acting as if their characters are disposeable, it more likely due to players who are offended by ther character's unique special snowflake-ness not being recognized by the DM and protesting by passive agressive play. I wouldn't know - in all my years of OD&D and AD&D play, with all of its unbalanced characters and lethal play I never say a single player treat their character as disposeable.
Meaningless player character death also means the player wasted their time building their character, which makes for a bad game experience.
Only if somehow you think that a) everything that the character did in their entire adventuring career before dying had no relevance and b) dying is such a bummer that it completely invalides all fun the player might have had with that character before that moment of death. Sure, maybe a character that dies on their first adventure might never have done anything of relevance - but even then one can at least hope they had fun playing - so it still was neither a waste of time nor a bad experience. There should be no randomness in character generation Random stats and hit points make for disposable characters, which is bad for a heroic fantasy game. Disagree. Randomness makes for more varied characters with quirks that no character optimizer would choose. What randomness does is make character optimization more difficult. So this is only valid, imho, if you equate unoptimized (which is not the same as useless) with throwaway.
Player characters should never get one-shotted.
You aren't wholly wrong - you just oversimplify. No character should ever get one-shotted without advance warning. As I pointed out in one of the SoDie threads - such attacks serve to heighten the tension in the game and they only do this if the players know they are there. Killing an unsuspecting character with a one-shot or save or die: Bad DMing. Foreshadowing the threat, letting the player know the threat is there and decide for themselves whether or not to face the risk or to take measure to mitigate the risk - good DMing. The problem isn't with one-shot attacks or Save or Die attacks - the problem is with DMs who use them stupidly and both waste their best benefit and piss off their players in the process.
Every character needs their own Moment of Awesome at some point in the adventure, or else it wasn't a good adventure for them. Because the players are working with the DM in constructing their story, the players need some control over when their Moment of Awesome happens.
Yeesh. Uh, no. ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! I am quite capable of having quite a bit of fun without a glorious moment of awesomeness each adventure. Sometimes I even have fun just roleplaying. Sometimes I bask in the reflected glory of my friends. Sometimes I escape by the skin of my teeth and enjoy the knowledge of my lucky survival against overwhelming odds. Sure, moments of awesomeness are nice when they happen. But, as I see it, as soon as its built into the mechanics and an automatic thing that is going to happen with any predicability - its lost any value it might have had. If I do something special - I want to feel awesome. But I don't need my games to artificially create moments for me to shine. I want to earn my trophys, not be given participation awards. I want to tell the story of how awesome I was in my game because I did something on my own to be awesome. Not because I spent my awesomeness points to make my character super-duper cool.
every class needs dailies
No they don't.
Simulationist types can come up whatever in-world explanation they want for why this is so; if they can't, that's not a problem with the game.
Actually, it is a problem with the game. Sounds like a variant of the Oberoni fallacy - a good DM can come up with an explanation. Anyone else - sucks to be you. Eh?
No player should ever feel like they are wasting their time.
Agreed with the caveat that not every character is going to be "tops" every round. If it sticks to "Everyone should be useful every [significant] stretch of exploration/roleplaying/combat" I'm cool with this.
That was the point I was trying to make.
Character classes and builds need to be balanced for both combat and non-combat encounters.
Maybe 'builds' mean something different for the 4e crowd, but to me the definition of a character "build" is any rules-legal combination of choices. In a game as complex as D&D, you can't balance every possible outcome due to combinatorial explosion. But, agreed in principle: Classes and the major variations thereupon should be valid in all three pillars.
Right.
Resources for combat and non-combat functionality need to come from separate pools.
Disagree. If there's going to be Vancian casting, they need to decide how to allocate their overall pool of spells when preparing spells.
That's problematic, because trying to anticipate the ratio of combat to non-combat ends up like playing rock-paper-scissors with the DM. D&D should not be rock-paper-scissors.
Every class needs at-wills.
Disagree on spirit. I think there's nothing wrong with the wizard being "out of gas" and having to resort to a basic attack - crossbow, daggers, swinging with their staff. It's something that can be done as often as the wizard likes, so I suppose you might call that an "at will" in the strictest sense of the word, but it defeats the purpose of Vancian casting if the vancian elements are only a cut above "I can do this all day" material
There's a big difference between at-wills and encounter powers. A properly balanced "Vancian" system would add a few more daily slots but take away encounter attack powers.
D&D is a form of cooperative heroic fantasy storytelling as well as a game.
I agree with the letter of this point, and the letter of some of your subpoints, but I find the spirit of it is... incompleat. D&D is a game as well as "cooperative heroic fantasy storytelling". I don't give the latter greater weight
The principles of roleplaying game design don't actually conflict with those of cooperative storytelling. They are complementary.
There should be no randomness in character generation.
I strongly STRONGLY disagree with this point. Random stats have resulted in some of my most inventive nad fun work as a player. Maybe it's because I have the weasely little black heart of a minmaxer, but when I see a rolled character, with some imperfections and rough edges, I get more engaged than I do with the cookie-cutter arrays I devise when point buying because they "get me the most plusses". Randomness should be an option. Perhaps even the first option, but whether not that is the case, it should be there.
Absolutely not. Randomness in character generation opens the door to horrific imbalances and worsens group dynamics.
Player characters should never get one-shotted.
Now, here's one I'm unsure on how to address I'm not a fan of always and never, so I'm inclined to disagree on that principle. However, your subpoints are quite lucid -- one hit from an average at-level monster should not, on average K.O. an average character. See there? I just allowed for corner cases. If the Raistlin Wannabe takes a critical hit from Mr. Minotaur, he might drop. I also happen to like SoD-like effects on principle, but I agree with your caveat -- there should be a way around them, because that ups the tension. Me, I like "Delayed Instadeath" where you get hit with an effect and then have to take some action (or recieve proper help) soon or perish
Even a crit shouldn't drop you from full to nothing.
every class needs dailies.
No, no NO. This is a short-sighted ADEU way of looking at the world. Dailies are one form of "awesomeness regulation" but there are plenty of others -- conditionals, combos, charge-up, cool-down, and who knows how many other options exist without shackling everybody to being the same, in this case running on the N/day Paragdim.
Remember, the Moment of Awesome needs to be in the hands of the player. Conditionals are not. Combos, charge-ups, and cooldowns basically amount to encounter powers, only harder to use. Which leaves dailies.
I'm a big fan, as it were, of difference. I want my classes feeling and acting as far from each other as are possible, and I'm sick and tired of the constant drone of "that can't ever be balanced". Balanced asymmetry all the way.
Look at 3e-
"But that's not balanced at all!"
You didn't let me finish. Look at 3e, but just tiers 3 and 4. Or, if you prefer, one or the other of 3 or 4. Now, the very definition of a tier is that all classes within the same tier are going to be balanced with one another, and I bring up tiers 3 and 4 because the distinction between the two is not itself usually large enough to notice in average gameplay.
Just looking at Tier 4, you have the Warmage and Adept, who are nothing but dailies; the Warlock, who has nothing but at-will abilities, the Rogue, who relies on situational effects (technically "at will" but not really), and the Barbarian, Ranger, and Hexblade who all have a mixture of "at will" and "Daily" effects in different degrees.
Asymmetrical balance: It works!
No it doesn't. When one class gets dailies and another class doesn't, you're limiting the adventuring day to a narrow range of number of encounters. And even then, you're basically admitting that the daily-less class can only keep up when the daily-using class is holding back in some fashion. Not balanced at all.
But if you really have a problem with martial dailies, here's a possible solution: have daily powers cost healing surges to use. There, now you have a reason why fighters can't use that big move all the time.
There, now you're messing with core game math in a way that at least striles me as being massivley likely to have cascading unintended concequences. I admire your spirit, sir, but quick fixes make for long-lasting problems
Dailies costing healing surges (or some other limited resource) is basically a coarse-grained power point system. It may need some work, but it's doable in principle.
