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## A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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The_Hanged_Man
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by The_Hanged_Man » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:50 pm

Plus, pecan pie is for the true pie aficionado, not for amateurs.
I really don't see the problem w/ having multiclassing. If you can balance a classless system based only on abilities, you can have multiclassing, which is nothing more nor less than balancing a bunch of linked abilities. And you can balance a classless system.
What you can't do is balance a multiclassing system where half of the classes suck wind after 10th level, and the other half only get weaker by multiclassing. That will never work.
It's like trying to make a pecan pie w/ blueberries.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by RandomCasualty » Tue Feb 15, 2005 11:21 pm

> The_Hanged_Man at [unixtime wrote:1108507822[/unixtime]]
> I really don't see the problem w/ having multiclassing. If you can balance a classless system based only on abilities, you can have multiclassing, which is nothing more nor less than balancing a bunch of linked abilities. And you can balance a classless system.

Well, I don't know if you can truly balance a classless system, not on absolute costs anyway.
The problem is synergy. You cannot have constant pricing for abilities that are standalone and abilities that modify other abilities.
The ability with synergy will beat the ability without synergy every time. That is, building off of your current abilities is always superior to starting anew on some new ability.
Everything needs to work together in some way, much like rogue sneak attack and fighter attacks work together. Spells have to do the exact same thing. So if you're a fighter/mage you need to be able to cast a spell and attack. And every combo you have needs to do something like that.
The other option is simply to toss Synergy entirely. Though this means that for the most part, you can't have buffs or other enhancement abilities. If you have an ability to fly, then all you can do is fly, you can't also shoot a bow, because that would create synergy. I dont' really think this is possible so its probably not worth it.
So you have to have universal synergy. And the only way to truly achieve that is to have a small and finite set of classes with carefully worked out abilities that synergize with others well.
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Username17
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by Username17 » Wed Feb 16, 2005 12:28 am

Well yeah, you're going to have to decide if everything is going to stack up like a sliver deck or be a series of stand alone opportunities like a Burn deck.
Essentially, there are two ways of doing things:
The Slivers!
Every single card in your deck provides some minor base function, but much more importantly it adds functionality to everything else you do. Thus, when you set up your current combo, it is the combo that's important - the individual pieces are important at all only in that they are required for your combo.
Lightning Bolts!
Every single card in your deck has a standalone instantaneous function. You play each new card irrespective of what the other previous cards even were. There is no combotation going on, save that eventually your static effects will add up to your opponent being dead before you are.
Trying to mix and mash those two styles together does not make for a good balanced game. But either one of those setups can be made into a good balanced game. And in M:tG, both styles can exist side by side because you honestly don't give a rat's ass if there are deck combinations that don't work at all. So it's perfectly possible for combo decks and burn decks to play each other and be balanced. Having there be good and shitty decks is part of the game, and that's fine.
But in an RPG, your goals are totally different. The goal is to have every deck that you hand out to people be playable and effective. That means that you aren't going out there asking people to figure out their own mana ratios or putting in setups that don't work well together. You are trying to make everything work well together. That means that an RPG can't even sustain separate kinds of ability damage very well.
Yes, in an RPG, the fact that Int damage and Wis damage don't add together to drop your opponent is severely pushing the limit of how much anti-synergy can be allowed.
-Username17
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Murtak
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by Murtak » Wed Feb 16, 2005 1:07 am

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1108513720[/unixtime]]But in an RPG, your goals are totally different. The goal is to have every deck that you hand out to people be playable and effective.

I disagree with this.
The goal is to have every type of character a player comes up with be viable in the game. The closer to a 100% ratio you, the easier and more varied the ways of achieving this are the better you achieved this goal. And obviously, if you can make any random selection of feats and classes work that is great.
But in the end I don't care if weapon finesse sucks for someone with high strength and low dex or if the 4 cha bard/sorcerer is close to useless. I do care if the system does not allow me to build a decent rapier fighter or antisocial spellcaster though. And I do somewhat care if building a viable non-caster means I have to stitch together levels in 15 classes in a very specific manner.
Your M:TG analogy fits quite well there. Noone cares about the crappy decks you can build. People do care about being able to play their creature horde decks, about playing their burn decks, their control decks. And if there is a broad enough selection of viable decktypes at a given level of play then everyone is happy.
Murtak
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The_Hanged_Man
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by The_Hanged_Man » Wed Feb 16, 2005 1:45 am

Good point. But still, in the "ideal" game, you should be able to have a near-infinite number of deck types. The goal is to have a character that's the equivilant of a burn-horde-control deck that's playable. Maybe it loses out in the min-max wars to other characters, but it's playable.
If you start talking about characters that aren't just unusual, but antithetical, then of course the game won't allow them to be powerful. If you want to make a character that can't read, but has to memorize spells from a spellbook, that character is going to suck. If you make a character that specializes in longbow tricks, and you also want to get kewl stuff from the class that requires you to have only one arm . . . you might have some problems. But that's a separate issue.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: A Curious Defense of the Difference Engine

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Post by RandomCasualty » Wed Feb 16, 2005 2:08 am

The problem with the "Burn" style is that in an RPG you don't necessarily randomly draw your choices and you don't necessarily use them up either. That is, you just get the most efficient means of killing people as a class ability and you keep using that. In a card game it's fine because you're limited to 4 of each card and you may not get your most efficient burn card all the time, and even if you do, you can only use it once.
Speaking in terms of levels, you run into the problem of having an ability that is either better, worse, or the same as the rest of your abilities at any given task. So if you want additional abilities you gain from your levels to matter you've got to keep them valuable. And this generally means having a complex matrix of effective attacks versus different creatures. Also, everyone needs some kind of weaknesses to keep them coming back for more attacks. That can be done possibly, but at some point you run out of meaningful stuff to hand out. But if your system is compicated enough that occurs at a level you really don't care anymore.
The main problem with burn is also that it's difficult to have unique abilities that don't synergize, especially since open ended gaming creates a lot of indirect synergy. Flight for instance can synergize with any defense form. And in an open ended game, eliminatating all synergy is probably impossible. It's doable in the context of a tactical boardgame certainly, but for an open ended RPG, I'm not sure it is achievable without making people's abilities boring.
The other spectrum, the sliver paradigm, is doable. To make it work, you've just got to have a very small amount of classes so you can adequately have everything build off of everything. You're creating essentially another dimension to your matrix everytime you add a class. So a 2 class set up is a 2 dimensional matrix. A 3 class set up is 3 dimensions and so on. So if you want this set up, the number of classes has to remain small, otherwise your matrix goes to all hell.
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