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I'm about to waffle...

Just so I'm totally clear, cos I see a couple of replies about balance in general... I'm talking purely about COMBAT balance. Where every build of every class of equal level has to be balanced point for point in combat. So no one player (for whatever reason) feels they aren't the hero of the adventure (who actually feels like this by the way?). Game balance, in generalities, is of course required, otherwise we can go be 5yr olds again and run around the garden pretending to be cowboys and indians (or whatever equivalent it is these days, Humans and Na'vi I suppose) arguing about who shot who first. I get it. Rules are good. No doubt. Take my money, I buy rules.

What I'd like to suggest, although I can see myself getting shot down very quickly, is that to balance a class with another should occur not only with what that class can do on a grid, in battle, killing things, but also what that class can do out of combat. If you widen the perspective of what can balance, I think you'd get more deviations from the norm and as a result more interesting things to play. Of course, you need to give that class things it can do out of combat if that thing is not going to 'just' be roleplayed with no dice.

Those things are skills. But here's the rub, D&D isn't a skills based system, it's a class based system and from what I read, the community likes the idea of simplifying the skills... so with fewer skills, there will be fewer differences in skill selection between 5 players and this in turn means fewer dice rolls outside of combat. And this then puts all the emphasis back on making sure the game balances in combat. 

I'd also point out that everything that isn't combat is not called roleplay. Roleplaying is the whole session, combat included.

It's often said that rules have nothing to do with how well the roleplaying is. I definitely used to believed that, but I cannot any longer. When a system takes 80% of the session time to run a straight forward combat - and not the big cheese combat at the end of the adventure, it's a goblin ambush - and not noobs looking up rules. It means I have 45 minutes in a whole session to advance story, character, plot, etc... Is it impossible to fix? No, nothing is impossible to fix. But it is the rules of the system that are directly impeding on the time I have in a session to do that other thing we like to do: roleplay. So, yeah - rules can definitely hamper roleplaying. 

It took me about 3 years "roleplaying" (I use the term incorrectly, we played D&D basic like it was Fighting Fantasy - a dungeon crawl where the only thing that mattered was the random loot dropped from the monster) from age 10 to age 13 to feel eventually dare to run a game outside a dungeon. That the players could go in any direction and not through one of two doors from a 5x5 room was terribly scary. Then for the next 5 years hack & slash and big ol' magical items were the bread and butter of the game in high school. I think had 4e hit then, all of my friends and I would've gobbled it up. No-one cared a mote about over-arching plots, character sub-plots, thematic references, foreshadowing, flashbacks... We thought we were very clever when the guest player turned out to be a traitor - again! Those were the days. If you're overly sensitive, you might see a veiled insult there... but truly there isn't one. At different times in a roleplaying hobby you want different things.

I'm long in the tooth... I want Game of Thrones (lots out of combat) not a magical Spartacus (mostly all in combat), but that's just me. :P Thanks for the interesting, different points of view. 

Doesn't that feel forced? Thematically? Narratively? Aragon == Frodo == Gandalf?

They don't have to be narratively or thematically equal; they have to be mechanically equal.


Balance is a mechanical concern.  Frodo can flail around ineffectually with a sword and get gored by an orc chieftain, but the game should not, as a function of class selection, limit the player to being a tactical liability.  If the player wants to suck at combat mechanically, the option is right there for the taking, but the option also exists (and it makes the game much easier to run for a DM) for Frodo's player to build a character that is competent mechanically but not narratively.


Stat Frodo as a warlord or a bard.  Done.  He gets his little sword and his magic armor, and instead of commanding your Aragorn to take another swing, you get yourself into trouble and squeal, "Strider!," and Aragorn leaps to your rescue.  Mechanically, the attack was granted by a power built into Frodo's character, but that only matters when you remove yourself from the narrative and read character sheets.

Meanwhile Gandalf has no more mechanical impact on the fight than Aragorn or Frodo, but we don't know if that's because he's a really well traveled, thoroughly educated creature with some tricks up his sleeve, or a staggeringly powerful being of pure light who has to hold his own power in check lest his radiance burn out the world.  As long as he never uses his Nuke the Realm from Orbit spell in the story, it doesn't matter whether it's on his character sheet or not.  The character can have power the player isn't allowed to access during the campaign.

I think that the obsession with the balance of combat mechanics is a buy product of the video game generation’s obsession with pvp. As an avid gamer of both the video and board game categories I am here to say that this in general this is not necessary. I do not think that all of the classes need to be roughly the same power level; I think that they all need to be useful to the party and make a significant contribution during play. Having said this I think that part of the problem with recent additions of D&D is player power creep, removing things like stuns and level drain so that nothing bad ever happens to the PCs is ridiculous. Monsters can and should have powers and abilities in combat and out that the players do not have and cannot get. Sometimes the monster is hard and eats the players this is a big part of the fun if the dragon never wins what’s the point. It’s hard to roll play fear of something you know can never beat you because combat system balance will not allow it

Apr 26, 2012 -- 2:29AM, thorbardin wrote:

It was Story first. The rules were there, and the DM could change any of them. The DM was encouraged to break whatever rule he saw fit for any reason, but most likely he did so to serve the story.

...

It is now about the Rules. The story is there, and the DM is required to come up with that. Be prepared for a long argument if you tell a player he cannot have his AoO. Or that your arch-villain moves 7 squares instead of 6. 

In this vein I have written the worlds most perfect RPG. Spoiler: Show

If I'm paying for rules that we are going to use, I'd prefer they be solid rules. If they are solid rules, lets use them as they are written. Only changing them when we all agree something else is better.