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3 years ago ::
Aug 05, 2010 - 10:38PM
#451
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Date Joined:
Apr 23, 2009
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Will, next time you have a thought, just let it go until you've reached the summation, and just go with that. Seriously, you sound like a crazy person until we get to the end, when suddenly you bring up a legitimate talking point. I'm not trying to be mean; I'm just saying that you should take a moment to organize your thoughts from an objective point of view instead of operating solely from your preferences, and then arguing that your preferences are law.
Control the shouting, dude, and you'll take a lot less flak.
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with wanting every class to be interesting and complex, but perhaps they're trying something new with the martial classes. As I've said before, the Knight looks hard to salvage, and the Slayer's in the same boat (the whole stance thing kinda sucks), but the Thief has potential. As long as these stay firmly in the realm of options and don't try to replace the originals, then I say let WotC experiment as much as they need. I'm keeping enough of an open mind to let myself be pleasantly surprised if the Knight or Slayer turns out to be awesome, but I won't be disappointed if they suck, because I've kept my expectations low.
The original core books said that this was our game too. It doesn't feel like that anymore.
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3 years ago ::
Aug 05, 2010 - 10:51PM
#452
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Date Joined:
May 18, 2003
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NO in an ideal world new players would learn the power system. THere shouldnt be classes that play on different levels. You cannot possibly balance classes with daily powers with those without it cant be done. When you simplify something too much you take away everything that makes it fun and interesting and will drive away new players. The class has to have options to be interesting. I have never met a player who enjoys just saying I attack, why because I doubt they are that comon. What is wrong with wanting every class to be interesting and complex, for every class to have something different to do each round?
Rather than asserting this, provide evidence. Feel free to use mathematical formulae. Calculus and regression analysis would be nice.
Anecdotal evidence is just that. You've never run into those people. I have. What makes your experience any more "accurate" to reality than mine? Answer: nothing.
Fortunately, WotC doesn't have to rely on anecdotal evidence, because they have some things you and i don't have, like market research on the gaming industry. They've done surveys. They've talked to current players, former players, and potential players. They've watched people play. They've probably even grabbed non-gamers off the street who fit some criteria of "potential customer" and stuck them in a room with the game to see how well it goes over. They've put them in there with a DM. Without a DM. And so on. Trust me, Hasbro can afford to do this. And trust me, they HAVE.
And all that research has led them to conclude that there's a demand for varying levels of class complexity both in D&D itself and in a D&D starting product. At that point, they no doubt turned things over to Design and Development and gave them what is essentially a "game engineering" challenge: "Make this happen: if you can." Then Mearls and his team went to work, kicked around a bunch of ideas...and came up with the classes for Essentials. Some rounds of testing later, they were okayed. That's how it WORKS.
To be fair, there was probably more back and forth earlier on in the process to determine what direction to take, rather than some dictate from above about what was needed. The designers and developers no doubt noticed something in their games. And then they suggested it be looked into to make sure it wasn't just unique to their experience.
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3 years ago ::
Aug 06, 2010 - 12:45AM
#453
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Date Joined:
Jan 12, 2003
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The Essentials are a series of products and books for D&D 4E which I may or may not buy depending on whether or not they actually have content I find interesting.
Knowing is Half the Battle.
The Other Half is VIOLENCE.
Imagine a lightsaber duel between Optimus Prime and Batman. You're welcome.
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3 years ago ::
Aug 06, 2010 - 1:13AM
#454
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Date Joined:
Sep 26, 2001
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NO in an ideal world new players would learn the power system. THere shouldnt be classes that play on different levels. You cannot possibly balance classes with daily powers with those without it cant be done.
To be fair, you can, it's just harder, especially on the DM. You really could get 3.x to deliver adequate class balance (no, really, you could, I've seen it done), for instance, at least, if you didn't go too high in level and if the DM worked at it. It was a fragile balance, but there were points - levels, challenges/day, variety/unpredictability of challenges, frequency of item loss, etc - at which 3.x, or even earlier versions of D&D could be balanced.
Of course, if the more of the classes' effectiveness is concentrated in unlimitted-use features and at-wills, the less of an issue lack of dailies, encounters or other limitted-use abilities becomes.
4e didn't just turn all classes into casters. It gave all classes about the same mix of limitted- and unlimitted-use abilities, with a fairly big chunk of overall effectiveness coming from things other than dailies. It wasn't perfectly consistent - the Wizard, for instance, had /really/ good dailies, so was loaded a bit in that direction. But, it was a definite move away from compensating for limitted use with /much greater/ power.
That makes the imbalance created by introducing a class with no dailies less than it would be if more of the power of each class were concentrated in it's dailies. It'll still introduce an imbalance. The DM will have to consider the potential impact of that imbalance on his game when he lays out his adventures. Well, he won't /have/ to consider it, but if he doesn't work at keeping the classes balanced, he'll see some dominate or suffer by comparison. It still shouldn't be as bad as it was with 3.x, though.
Fortunately, WotC doesn't have to rely on anecdotal evidence, because they have some things you and i don't have, like market research on the gaming industry. They've done surveys. They've talked to current players, former players, and potential players. They've watched people play. They've probably even grabbed non-gamers off the street who fit some criteria of "potential customer" and stuck them in a room with the game to see how well it goes over.
Yeah... 'market research...' sometimes it works, sometimes it's wrong in such obvious-in-retrospect ways as to be truely comical. We'll see how it goes.
Love 4e? Concerned about its future? Join the Old Guard of 4e"You want The Tooth? You can't handle The Tooth!" - Dahlver-Nar. "If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly" - E. Gary Gygax
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3 years ago ::
Aug 06, 2010 - 2:31AM
#455
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Date Joined:
Apr 28, 2008
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You cannot possibly balance classes with daily powers with those without it cant be done.
Rather than asserting this, provide evidence. Feel free to use mathematical formulae. Calculus and regression analysis would be nice.
Anecdotal evidence is just that. You've never run into those people. I have. What makes your experience any more "accurate" to reality than mine? Answer: nothing.
I may be making a mistake by sticking my nose in this ... though I thought this whole thing had been addressed in the whole "CoDzilla" threads back in the 3E forums ...
Classes given Daily resources have to be given weaker "always on" resources that I will call just "regular" powers (and encounter powers are "always on" if you carve the day up at the encounter level, which we do) than classes without Daily resources. Or else the class with Dailies is strictly superior to the class without (take away a Rogue's Dalies, you now have a weaker Rogue).
Therefore, if a class with Dailies uses no dailies in a certain encounter, it was flat-out weaker in that encounter than the class that has none of its class-level power wrapped up in Dailies.
This is OK if and only if the class dailies are exactly powerful enough that their use in some encounters makes up for their lack of use in others.
But there's a problem. The only way to balance encounters where the class uses daily and regular resources vs. encounters where the class uses only regular resources is to assume a linear relationship between encounters in which a daily is used and encounters in which it is not in other words (bolded for importance) when creating a class with daily powers, you have to start by declaring that the strength of using X daily powers in one encounter balances out the use of a*X encounters in which no powers are used, where a is some scaling factor representing the relative power of a class's dailies vs. regular powers. So far so good, it's all theoretically possible up to this point.
In addition to classes with Dailies having weaker regular powers than classes without, for balance there have to be three other requirements:
1) daily powers must not interfere with each other, either positively or negatively. Or players would have to specifically avoid using powers in ways that either enhanced or harmed other powers (or were enhanced or harmed by other powers).
2) Encounters must be identical, or else a daily power could be used in a place where it is too effective or not effective enough. Or players would have to specifically choose to avoid using the powers in circumstances where they would be too useful or not useful enough.
3) There must be the same number of encounters each day. If a character expends 3 dailies, he also needs to participate in 3*a other encounters to be balanced. If he participates in less than 3*a encounters, he got extra power that was not paid for by being less powerful in an encounter. If he participates in more than 3*a other encounters, he is working unpaid overtime.
Huh ... so I actually just proved that it is possible for classes with only regular powers to be balanced with classes with dailies. Not my intention, but I'm glad I got the right answer, rather than the answer I was looking for.
I think the important thing, though, is that the three numbered requirements are impossible to fulfill in practice. And if you're talking about adding classes with only regular powers to the game (i.e. the Essentials classes), it's already impossible for them to be balanced because requirement 1 (dailies can't interfere with each other) has already been violated by daily powers that already exist.
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3 years ago ::
Aug 06, 2010 - 2:35AM
#456
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Date Joined:
Apr 28, 2008
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Whee! That took a long time to write and Tony swooped in before me!
I'll just add that my post agrees with what Tony said: it is possible to, through force of will as a DM and a bit of player participation, make an unbalanced system act as through it's balanced. But that doesn't make the underlying system balanced (it's possible to put a matchbox under a table leg to stop it from wobbling, but that doesn't make it a non wobbly table).
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