[D&D]Balance killed my game
Patrice:
Mmmh. My group is basically made of old-timers. People used to the 3.0 tactical thinking and to cooperative teamplay. They're good tacticians. Yet, since the random factor used to be high, they faced several huge drawbacks with every "edition" before the 3.5. After the 3.5 was released, that was gone. On a side note, it took us about a dozen sessions to level up to the 10th level with the 4th. That maybe explains a bit of the tactical mastery, I dunno. That's 4 sessions you're talking about. After 4 sessions, we were pretty happy with the 4th too.
That was before we understood how little choices mattered and how weak was the influence of our "tactical thinking". I take your point about team-building vs. char-building and admit, of course, that the challenge aspect of the Gamist agenda seems to be addressed throughout the game. But I maintain that deep down, it's not. Because the level of risk you take doesn't really matter, it's just your routine facing the encounter's routine
Addressing challenges implies choices in my opinion. Tactical choices pregnant with tactical outcomes. What you consider as choices are just plain mistakes. The first 2-3 sessions you still make them, but soon you learn enough and you contend with the routine. From that point on, there's no choice anymore. That's what I mean by balance ruining the game. That's where I feel the same about WoW in which, for each given class, the game gives you dozens of options, none of them being useful except one. It's another way of ruining the Step on Up system. When you get there, the game doesn't provide any thrill anymore, but a railroaded version of tactics in which you pretend to Step on Up. My point is that you actually don't. It's like "and the winner is... E-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y! Three cheers for everyone, you're all fantastic!".
Adam Dray:
I will definitely defer to you on certain technical issues about play, since you likely have more actual play experiences than I.
My main point though was that the challenges in D&D (especially 4E) are a group thing, not an individual thing. The Step on Up components are largely doing your part in the group. Did you guys feel that the challenges your party faced weren't challenging? Were there no, "Hey, we really smoked that monster!" or "Wow, we barely got away from that dragon" type moments?
Jasper Flick:
Hi Patrice,
Just to be clear: I'm not judging out. I don't say you're doing anything wrong, neither am I implying that character optimization or anything like that is bad. I'm just trying to get a handle on your preferences.
Me showing the other side of the coin is basically acknowledging what you expierence, trying to shed light on why this is the case. D&D 4e has the two conflict of interest dials, as defined in Rons' Gamism essay, set to their lowest ever, and the book doesn't provide useful guidance for turning them up. That's what I concluded by reading the book and playing the game. So if you want to tune things up, you'll have to do it yourself and yes, you might end up playing Drifted D&D 4e.
Getting back to you, you said D&D 3.5e and 4e ruined it for you. Does this mean that D&D 3.0 did in fact provide what you want? Or do you harken back to older editions of D&D? Did you play D&D 3.0 a long time, or perhaps short enough that the disappointment just hadn't surfaced yet? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.
Patrice:
Sure, Jasper, I wasn't assuming you were judging nor was I willing to exhibit my experience as some sort of point, Adam. That's the problem with the written media, I'm fine with you guys pointing things but I just can't spill emoticons all over the text to show I'm happy with this debate going on :).
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My main point though was that the challenges in D&D (especially 4E) are a group thing, not an individual thing. The Step on Up components are largely doing your part in the group. Did you guys feel that the challenges your party faced weren't challenging? Were there no, "Hey, we really smoked that monster!" or "Wow, we barely got away from that dragon" type moments?
This happened a bit because I kept maintaining pressure and tension, but after a while, I couldn't sustain the illusion ever. At the beginning, none of us had a good grasp of the system, and everything was very challenging but that phase didn't last very long and that's after that we began to get bored. If you want to get a feeling of challenge, you need to believe in it. To believe some of your skill weighted the balance so much that you won victory. The problem is that, at some point, we didn't anymore.
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Me showing the other side of the coin is basically acknowledging what you expierence, trying to shed light on why this is the case. D&D 4e has the two conflict of interest dials, as defined in Rons' Gamism essay, set to their lowest ever, and the book doesn't provide useful guidance for turning them up. That's what I concluded by reading the book and playing the game. So if you want to tune things up, you'll have to do it yourself and yes, you might end up playing Drifted D&D 4e.
It's maybe as simple and straightforward as you say: dials are so low that for us they can't fulfill our Gamist needs, mostly because of the "belief" I have mentionned earlier. I've come to realize through all this rambling that I price really high combination mechanics in Gamist designs and games. That's, in my opinion, the difference between 3.0 and 3.5 (aside from the whole OGL thing that fully allow and acknowledge whatever Drifting you're doing, up to allowing publishing it). The 3.0 has loopholes, which as such doesn't interest me, but allow tactical combinations. There is a chance for the unexpected. Now, I've maybe not played it long enough - 20? 25 sessions? - and I'm maybe identifying too much "tactical skill" and "combination". Will I give D&D4 another "drifted" chance? Yes. If only because I want to see where it leads. But in general, I prefer to go for another game if the game I'm playing needs too much drift to be good for my needs.
Callan S.:
Hi Patrice,
Do the rules say you can't go five levels (or whatever) over party level, or do they just say that would be hard? If it says you can't, yeah, to do so would be ceasing to play D&D. But if it doesn't, then you would be playing the game, just in a poorly documented way. One of the (perhaps devious) things about D&D (pretty much any edition) is that you can never pin it down and say 'Well, because of X, it's bad/not for me/not for an agenda' because the game leaves a whole bunch of ambiguous options that someone can come along and say 'well, you could have done Y instead!'. D&D has evolved, essentially, to avoid standard methods of critique this way - perhaps a bit like the AIDS virus, that keeps changing so the immune system can't keep up (oh boy, am I gunna get in trouble). Every time you say X makes it bad, a Y way of doing it comes up. It's the game which miraculously can never fail - supposedly. And probably every other traditional RPG that followed in it's mould, too.
I'm not so much saying it's your fault - I'm more prompting an improvement in critique/immunilogical responce, because the game text is essentially designed to defeat conventional critique. You have to nail it at a more sublime level (which a half listening audience probably wouldn't get). My own is that it's more like a programming language and thus is essentially stone soup - I'm putting all the flavour, taste and heartyness in and the book does fuck all to add any of those things. That's why when I found that map generator it prompted quite a few games - because it put in the effort and I just did a little massaging. Even then mine suffers from "You could have bought supplements" and then I counter with "Why would I buy more stuff when I got nothing from the original product?" which is countered with "It was never designed to do that, because of X, Y and Z" and so on and so on.
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