[D&D]Balance killed my game
Patrice:
All my D&D games since the 3.5 came out were boring. So much for actual play. Just boring. Boring to the point my players and I have just quit playing D&D altogether after having a long try at 4th Edition. And strangely, we've also quit playing World of Warcraft since WLK is out. And oh, Guild Wars since GW:EN too. No creative agenda clash, no social issues, no special reason: we're just bored.
But there must be a reason. There has to be. And there's a common feature in all these cases, these games have achieved balance, in the same way some planes fell under the reign of Law and Order in Moorcock's fictions: frozen in stasis. D&D4, for instance, lets you choose character builds, manage your powers, pick a careful choice among skills, and it's fun because you think it's going to let you shine, to show your guts and sense of strategy, much alike Talents points in WoW or skillbar builds in Guild Wars. But then, you play. And when you play you realize that the game has been so much balanced that whatever choice you make is, deep down, equal to all choices. As you level up again and again you realize another thing: you can't really die.
I have set a dire level of challenge in my late D&D4 adventures, and no player died ever. And I can tell you, I'm not a piece of cake when GM-ing Gamist. Not that I delight in PK, but if the engine of the game is driven by the risk of death, not being able to die makes the game a bit less interesting, don't you think?
The myth of competition between players seems to me as having been such a red herring to the 3.5 and 4th designers that nodding to this has flushed all life out of the game. When you have rules that emphasize cooperative play and fluff text openly disallowing competition, why would you want to reach a total balance in addition? So. Sounds like what is considered as "having an opportunity to shine" has more or less become "look, that's for your skill, Step on Up, bud!". This is not what I call Step on Up. I love combos, I love the slight discrepancies in rules that allow you to grin and say "look, I'm doing that, and that and now I use this and look, look... KA-BOOOOM, see you in Hell". I remember having designed a healing skill build in Guild Wars. This build allowed me to heal almost instantly 130% more than any other healers. During the two weeks before it was nerfed, I've had my share of glory.
Now, I didn't complain about the nerf, that's part of the sport you know. In OD&D or the totally unbalanced AD&D2, the nerf came as a GM's fiat or a new houserule bending and we all were happy with that. I have no solution really but I say, if all choices are equal, why is D&D offering a choice? It's not. And tell me, where is the Step on Up then? Gone. What you have as a spare notion of "fun" is waiting for your turn to shine and pray that the adventure has been designed good enough to provide your character its due "spotlight time". The result looks similar but gut-less, strategy-less and... Fun-less.
Jasper Flick:
This reminds me of the recent thread [3.x/4e] Encounter XPs are not a reward, they are a pacing mechanism. It touches the issue of non-challenge as well.
I see no "your chance to step on up, bud" in D&D 4e, I see "nobody is useless" and "you can choose a few different tactical flavors of combatant". Mind you, in that regard it works great. It's a well-oiled encounter machine, family friendly, without teeth. If you ask me, the engine of the game absolutely isn't driven by the risk of death or competition. It's driven by living the hack&slash fantasy dream.
Now I must add that the most straightforward way to rack up the difficulty is simply postponing extended rests. The first encounter of a sequence will never be tough. It'll only get interesting past the fourth encounter or so.
What's interesting is that your explicit examples of joy come from pre-game character optimization. Creating a character build that works great, then showing it off during play. Is this the focus of your interest, or just part of a broader scope?
Callan S.:
When I ran 3.x ages ago, it was primarily because I found an online maze generator that would roll treasures and monsters for me, along with a nifty maze. Hell, it was a fun toy in itself. And when I plugged in party level, I would put in party level, say, +3 or +4? And it was typically three players in the group, so a man lower than a standard party. And the map generator would actually add on some party levels as it chose from a range. I did massage the maze a bit, but basically I'd often look at a monster and go "Your hot! Your a keeper!". Ah, the first level party hearing the rasping breath of a flesh golem behind a door...and thinking better of it...I think flesh golems were CR 7 or something. Then again I put a red dragon in our only game of 4E so far, telegraphed something hot and horrible was behind the door, and they still went in. I think they knew it was basically a one shot, though (Wish I had a map, monster and treasure generator for 4E...)
Anyway, what I mean to say is - a dire level of challenge? D&D now almost literally has a dial you can turn all the way up to thirty in 4E. If there was no risk of death, no, it was not a dire level of challenge, dear boy! Turn the dial up another notch/spin the wheel on the rack one more time!
Or, watering that down, why are you certain you were giving dire levels of challenge?
Patrice:
Quote from: Jasper Flick on July 23, 2009, 02:30:58 AM
I see no "your chance to step on up, bud" in D&D 4e, I see "nobody is useless" and "you can choose a few different tactical flavors of combatant". Mind you, in that regard it works great. It's a well-oiled encounter machine, family friendly, without teeth. If you ask me, the engine of the game absolutely isn't driven by the risk of death or competition. It's driven by living the hack&slash fantasy dream.
That's the bright side of the exact same thing. If you get to the essence of what you're saying, you're saying that D&D4 (or 3.5 as far as I'm concerned) is not intended to fulfill a Gamist Creative Agenda. We've actually come to the point of Simulating the Gamist oddity with such a broad aim at the casual audience and such a fear of the hard-core that... the game isn't even Gamist anymore as such. No more Step on Up but Right to Dream. Do you see the twist in it? It's "we have the right to dream upon stepping on up", in which the Step on Up standard had become the genre of the simulation. It's still labeled as Challenge/Build/Guts/Taking Risks but it's just a label since no strategizing, no risk-taking, no character creation build really makes a difference enough to shine. There's but two options here: either D&D3.4 and 4 are failed Gamist endeavours or they are Sim-oriented games built upon the cheesy rip of the brand's original tremors. Back when we were heroes.
I've played D&D3.5 and 4 by the book more or less. And when the book didn't provide enough challenge, I've set all the encounter dials to "Hard". I admit I've not gone beyond that. I didn't remove the extended rests, I didn't crash the ceiling with the challenge level but if I did, would I be playing the same game? I consider as a weak solution you both guys telling me "look, you didn't try to play the game as it isn't intended, so that's your fault". Huhu? Now character building isn't everything, Jasper, I wholly agree with that, it's just what came as examples since I was thinking about WoW's WLK at the same time.
This being said, I can understand how and why players like playing this version of D&D, the Sim game in which we dream about challenges, but how long? Won't at some point the players realize the illusion of it? Okay now that's maybe addressing Sim at large and that's a bit silly of me but... To think of D&D as a purely Sim game breaks my heart a bit.
Adam Dray:
Man, I think you're doing it wrong. If you don't find surviving 4E games challenging, then either your group is way smarter than mine or the challenges aren't sufficiently tough.
Daniel ran a 4E mini-campaign of 4 linked one-shot adventures. I played Tobias, a young and ideal cleric. I made suboptimal choices when I built him. These choices put the entire party at a severe disadvantage and almost got us all killed several times. Because we advanced three levels between each game (the progression was 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th, if I recall correctly), I had a chance to learn from my mistakes and correct them as I went. By the time we reached 10th level for the fourth session, we were all pretty well optimized and fighting well together. We had to earn that, though.
Let me point out that I believe 4E optimization is as much about optimizing the party composition and riffing off each other's powers as it is building a singularly strong character. I have never heard this "myth of competition between players." When people say D&D 4E strongly supports Gamist / Step On Up play, they don't mean competition between players. They mean challenge, which is related to competition but is a different beast. Even discounting the character build portion of play, one must admit that the tactical game offers challenge as a core part of play.
When you talk about balance ruining the game, do you mean the inability to find winning loopholes? I think 4E has a few of those, too, if that's what is fun for you. In any case, I have had a vastly different experience with 4E than you, apparently. From building a character optimally to using my powers optimally to functioning as an orchestrated party to win encounters, all of the 4E play I have encountered has offered rich opportunity for our Gamist agenda.
I'm not trying to talk you into liking the game or anything. Play something that pushes your buttons. I'm just saying that my friends and I seem to have exactly the opposite reaction to 4E than you did.
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