[D&D]Balance killed my game
Ron Edwards:
Here's an older thread which speaks to this topic: The Grognard Speaks: System and Step on Up in OD&D.
Best, Ron
Guy Srinivasan:
AFAICT you have the same issues I have with 4e's tactical combat minigame: when any single combat encounter is viewed as a board game (i.e. translating all narrative and non-narrative goals into the objective function of the transformed game and then looking at the result as you would look at winning Puerto Rico or Settlers of Catan or something), except possibly for some exceptionally well constructed encounters, it makes a pretty subpar game. All over the place there are decision points for which it's very easy to separate your possible actions into "superb", "good", and "bad", there are none in the "superb" category, there are lots in the "good" category, and choosing one of the "good" options rather than another barely changes the outcome at all. This setup makes for massive analysis paralysis problems with not a lot of emotional payoff (from the boardgamey part of play, not talking about story or premise or whatnot here).
Thus far I have thought of 3 fixes.
1) Do not view single combat encounters as a board game. Instead, view something larger as a board game, like stretches between extended rests, or something. That particular view is currently unsupported by the RAW since there are no guidelines on when extended rests should occur, just how long they must take when they do occur. The advantage to this is that if set up well it would change minor efficiency gains in a single combat encounter into major gains in the <whatever the larger thing is>. I think 4e has the capacity to make decisions leading to minor efficiency gains meaningful in the sense that you're talking about, but the visceral feedback might be too amorphous - while the fact that you saved your daily without much opportunity cost might make it 40% more probable you can survive 6+ instead of 5 combat encounters this <larger>, the feedback just doesn't feel as good as "hey look I can stack your action point bonus with my extra move action!" to me.
I haven't been able to come up with a good coherent set of houserules to make this work well.
2) Do not view single combat encounters as a board game. Do not bring the expectation of sweet combos or crafty tricks to the battlemat. While this would work to fix the problem (it's what I do now as a player), it's fairly hard for humans to change their expectations on a dime, and it certainly doesn't solve anything if you're looking for "sweet combos and crafty tricks in a tactical combat minigame" rather than "feeling good about 4e's tactical combat minigame".
3) Find a class of terrain features or non-kill-them-all objectives that reliably does translate to a game where 4e's options are meaningful. Again, I haven't been able to come up with something yet. My intuition is that if something like this exists then it will be in the realm of movement - for some examples, see here. Most objectives I've thought about or tried are either movement based (boiling down to go here! then here! then there! maybe spend some minor actions!) or if played correctly (again, board game sense) are not interesting (save this low-hp NPC from dying is impossible without the enemies acting very suboptimally, save this high-hp NPC is usually trivial, naive escape is either double-run or if that wouldn't work just kill-them-all, etc).
Frank Tarcikowski:
It’s very true that when all choices are equal, choices are irrelevant. I’ve only played D&D4 once, and never read the rules, but I don’t think all choices are equal in that game. As I know WLK much better, I think I know what you’re really about. The point is not that choices are irrelevant. The point is that anyone can do it. Blizzard, with WLK, and Wizards, with D&D4, have made their games more accessible, and less hard.
Back in the day of Classic WoW, when levelling to 60 took forever and some classes could not be levelled sensibly at all, and you needed 40 people and tanks with full fire resistance gear to even begin thinking of raiding Molten Core, or six hours for a clear run of Blackrock Depths – that was a game for fanatics! The effort required was utter madness. And even in BC, when I first tried to get together my tank equip for raiding, I did a 12 part quest chain with a 5 member group quest at the end just to get a rare shield (in WLK, I’ll just spend a few hundred Gold on mats and get me a blacksmith to craft an epic one). The first heroes were really edge-of-my-seat, one-little-mistake-and-we’ll-wipe. I actually found it a bit too hard.
Now, I don’t know how well this translates back to older editions of D&D. When we played AD&D2 back in the 80’s we were kinda clueless so I can’t really judge the game. I never played 3.x. However, my point is, if challenge is part of a game design, you are setting a threshold for the amount of effort and dedication which is required to play the game successfully. Blizzard have lowered this threshold considerably with BC and again with WLK. They are making WoW accessible to more casual players, on the downside exhausting the content much quicker. However, they did provide some challenge for the hardcore players, by way of some very hard dungeon/raid achievements (like Sartharion 3D) or the Hardmodes in Ulduar.
In D&D4, such challenges for the hardcore players may be lacking. So maybe the very reason why it’s fun to many players who weren’t much into this sort of game before is also the reason why it’s not fun to you any more: It’s just too easy. I daresay balance is not the issue here.
- Frank
Patrice:
The threshold thing sure comes into what repels me but I want to rephrase it according to my experience: it's not so much about the choices being easy than about the choices being actually offering fake options. If you take the WLK example, you can play, say, a single class in two, maybe three different ways. Can you tweak it further? No. The game offers a vast gem and enchantment management system that eventually comes to the same conclusion: there's just one way to do it right and be efficient. In D&D4, it's a bit the same except that in addition, even bad choices are rewarded almost equally. I don't want my pain, nor the hardcore thing, I want to use my creativity when playing.
One thing we seem to forget a bit too often when it comes to Gamist roleplaying games is that... They're roleplaying games. In theThe Grognard Speaks: System and Step on Up in OD&Dthread Ron is referencing, Sean underlines this when he gets to explain the underlying social mechanics of pre-2nd Edition AD&D and their negociated structure. That's where roleplaying actually hides. He eventually gets to say that:
Quote
I loved this style of play, but I realize now that what I loved was the social feedback loop of doing creative things and getting positive feedback for my creativity and giving it for the creativity of others. OD&D 'facilitated' this by essentially giving you nothing to go on for this part of the game. Yet without this stuff, the game is just a bad wargame.
Ron is adding there:
Quote
The guys I was playing with had never seen anything like this before. They were 18-21, all come to role-playing via Magic: the Gathering, and generally pretty skilled at picking Feat combos as they levelled up. They also understood bullying that went straight to Social Contract: "My way or I'll stop being your friend," basically. But this was ... by the rules! But it bypassed the rules! But it was by the rules! Sput!!
There's two styles of play here, both equally relevant: the former negociated play and the combo-based M:TG boardgame-like system. When D&D4 went straight into the second, as do most online RPGs, I thought that that would be an opportunity to test those combo mechanics applied to actual roleplaying. My expectations weren't met since the combo-based system is just a pretense of combo while 3.0 still allowed some good Feat synergy and the roleplaying side has been totally depleted by the extensive covering they've done of all the conflicts that were negociated before.
I've come to think that the whole inherited design idea holding sway upon the 3.5 and the 4th looks like "when the rules cover everything, when all shade is dismissed, we have a good design". I say, quite the contrary, you've lost everything that gave fuel and power to your game as far as the player's creativity is concerned. When I look back at the T&T save rolls, at former editions of D&D and AD&D or at Lejendary Adventures maybe, I fully agree with the conclusions both Sean and Ron shared in the aforementioned topic that a cleverness feedback loop drives the Step on Up system of those games. Roleplaying hid in the misty parts of the rules, but was core in everything.
Now, removing all creativity options and creative power from the players of a roleplaying game is the worst possible flaw ever, even if such creativity was intented for Step on Up only. Looking at it this way, I find the GSL consistent with this creativity denial. What's left is a board game or a wargame. Since I'm not a natural enemy of wargames, having played quite a lot of those during the years, I'm open to the idea but I expect a wargame to provide me, at least, with opportunities to put my wits in action. That's not the case with the 4th for all the reasons I've mentioned earlier.
Sorry to answer you that bluntly, Guy, your ideas sure look good but... They seem to me a bit like the Money Pit Callan was writing about. Why would you spend such an amount of time and energy to transform a game that, deep down, doesn't meet your expectations? Why wouldn't you design one yourself or just pick another, more suitable to your tastes and needs?
One funny effect of this long rambling is that it took me back into the retro-gaming systems blossoming these days: OSRIC, C&C, S&W, LL and LJ. I've always thought of retro-gaming as of a kind of nostalgia but what if actually, less was more? Ideas still linger in my mind that suit this media since they involve gaming fantasy more than sword & sorcery fantasy and for these ideas (and these ideas only), I'll take a long peek into these systems instead of trying to carve them in a system that obviously isn't designed for the kind of play I like.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Okay, I see what you are saying. I think two very different kinds of creativity should be kept apart: There is one type of creativity that is all about the SIS, about plausibility/in-game logic, about clever tactics that make use of Situation (as in “Elements of Exploration”) via Positioning. That’s the one that gets sung all the “old school” hymns. Sean calls it “avoiding the rules” in the linked thread, I would rather call it “working with the fiction”. The other type of creativity is all about the games’ mechanics, about looking carefully at the mathematics and procedures of play, about clever tactics that make use of System via Resources. I would call that “working with the rules”. Both of these are rewarded through Effectiveness.
So, working with the fiction requires that the rules leave space for it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they do not cover it at all, but it means they build on the SIS. This has been called “the fiction leads”. Whereas working with the rules means that the rules lead.
From what I have read, in D&D 3.x you had the rules leading, but they were complex enough that rules mastery needed to be earned (and was rewarded). It seems that this effect was enhanced by the fact that finding a good build was the entire point of rules mastery, whereas applying that build in actual play was fairly straightforward. And if your build was weak, well, you sucked. In D&D4, it seems to me there are no “weak builds” as such, it’s more a matter of how you make do with what you’ve got once the minis hit the flip mat.
Yet another point you mention is the “obvious best build”. I would define the existence of such an “obvious best build” as a lack of balancing, but that’s a question of how you define balancing. The problem with D&D and even more so with WoW is the sheer mass of fanatic nerds who will have it all figured out in a matter of days and post it all over the internet. WoW as an engine is quite complex, but if you’ve got your Elitist Jerks DPS spreadsheet and some guys who will test various rotations on Patchwerk the very day the patch comes out, well, who can compete with that?
It’s a bit like Chess openings. You can’t be smarter than generations of grand masters. You play the first couple of moves by the book, full stop. That’s kind of like where WoW is today, and where D&D 3.x seems to have ended up, too. I don’t mind that, but you seem to.
- Frank
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