Balancing 3.x

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:54 pm

Kaelik wrote: You don't get to claim that every single level 5 spell and up is a poor design decision that doesn't meet the theme of 'heroic fantasy' because it says 'heroic fantasy' and not 'Heroic fantasy, as defined by RC that douche on a forum who thinks that people shouldn't be able to teleport long distance, or divine information, or gate in allies, or kill people with a single spell.'

Actually, no none of that has anything to do with heroic fantasy. You can have high powered heroic fantasy. Slayers for instance is still heroic fantasy genre, regardless of the fact that they can blow up entire cities with one spell. The only thing that defines heroic fantasy is that its about being heroic. That means taking risks.

It's more a playstyle than anything else. Shadowrun for instance emphasises strategic over heroic play. You're not really looking to go in there and blow shit up like the Matrix. You don't want to do fancy stunts and look awesome. You're looking to get in there, make as little noise as possible adn get out, hopefully before you're detected and draw too mcuh fire.

Heroic style is all about big explosions, cool moves, and climactic confrontations.

Or to put it another way, the heroic style is like playing Doom 2 or even Gears of War. The strategic style is playing SWAT 4 or Splinter Cell.

Keep in mind that all of those are cool games. Just like Shadowrun is a cool game. It's just that D&D isn't Shadowrun.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:07 am

Except of course that D&D is very much Shadowrun, much more so than heroic anything, by your definition.

Of course, your assertion that heroic fantasy written on the back of a book in 2000 means exactly what you define as heroic and not what sane people define as heroic isn't really evidence of anything.

Especially since what you are talking about has basically nothing to do with the rules of 3e or even 2e D&D.

violence in the media · Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:16 am

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Only it's supposed to be a heroic fantasy game and people are going to make heroic fantasy concepts for it. It's just bad rules that reward people for doing nonheroic fantasy stuff.

I dunno, sometimes I rather like the disparity between playing heroically and playing smart. Then again, I generally expect (and occasionally promote) prodigious levels of bastardry from the party.

Spoilered the rest of this as it's an anecdotal tangent to the actual discussion here.

I ran one game, shortly after 3.0 came out, where the 4 divine casters spent a significant portion of the time trying to cause each other to anger their gods and lose their powers and generally show each other up. Resurrection prayers were generally role-played along the lines of, "Oh, powerful and mighty Wee Jas! I beseech you to restore to life this poor, misguided fool that Pelor did not see fit to protect from a sound drubbing at the hands of the giants of Stone Hill, so that he may see the majesty and glory of your power and benevolence...." Suffice to say, they'd let each other get killed if they didn't think it would hinder the party's objectives or cause them any problems personally.

In such an environment, whether attacking from invisibility was an honorable thing to do or not wasn't even on the moral radar. Discussions of morality and appropriate behavior centered around whether you should eat anything you could theoretically talk to (the purpose of this argument was usually to give the Druid fits), whether you should steal from someone without doing them the honor of killing them first, and if it was okay to pursue immortality by sacrifice, provided you only sacrificed enemies and "bad" people. They weren't an adventuring party so much as a mobile nest of vipers, and only one of the 9 players actually set out to be an evil alignment.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:55 am

Kaelik wrote: Especially since what you are talking about has basically nothing to do with the rules of 3e or even 2e D&D.

Well yeah, the rules have horrible unintended problems. We can see that pretty obviously by accounts of how the designers expected you to play the game. They infact don't value divination magic very highly and don't expect you to use it to play SWAT style attacks.

We can see pretty much anywhere they give character building advice (I think there was some in complete arcane or complete mage, I forget) that the advice is completely contrary to what really works in game, but it's clear they're trying to create a different sort of game with a different kind of playstyle.

Now, you can make the claim they failed in creating that kind of playstyle, and that'd be true. But claiming that their intent was to create a non-heroic game is just flat out not true, if you've read like anything the designers have published, or any of the flavor text.

You are seriously supposed to be able to make Conan and make him work. Fighter and Barbarian are both PC classes. If the intention was to make them suck, they'd be NPC classes.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 12:05 pm

Murtak wrote:
Roy wrote:Except that it's fighter power vs enemy power. The fact his buddies are also far better is nice, but ultimately irrelevant or at least secondary to the DM having an increasingly hard time finding anything that won't utterly annihilate him even if he were to try.
If you are incapable of simply picking your encounters from a lower CR you are correct. Also I feel sorry for you.

Fail, learn to pay attention. Now we're back to 'PCs get the insulting half XP and 60% gold because they suck'. Also, even that doesn't work, because they're getting outperformed by completely uncreative Rogues of cohort level and getting the fuck beat out of them by completely uncreative Barbarians at cohort level since while ~15-20 damage is trivial to competent level 5s, it had a 95% chance of one shotting one of the party members and around a 50-75% chance of two shotting the rest. Remember, this is just rage + charge + PA with greataxe, no charging tricks whatsoever, or special races, or anything. Just a Thog Smash human. Which isn't even as good as an ICONIC (Krusk). And given that the iconic characters are invariably the paragons of Suck and Fail...

Encouraging incompetence does in fact encourage it. Trying to fix it prevents the problem.

Let me give you a different example. You play a fighting game. Your friend has already beaten the computer tons of times, so it is set to ultra-hard. It knows 99% of the combos, evades most regular attacks entirely and blocks the rest. To even go 50-50 against the game you have to play at a level most tournament players don't reach. So you get crushed. Utterly. Repeatedly. After you lose twenty times in a row you ask your friend for help. He tells you to suck it up and learn to play. He tells you to counter throws, to reverse the computer's attack, to not get hit by power moves.

Are you seriously telling me that is the way to approach games?

First, that wouldn't happen. AI is not that good. Second, provided he actually told me how to do those things that would be helpful advice. If he were just lol noob learn to play it wouldn't, but no one is fucking saying that. Third, the bar for competence is not 'ultra hard'. It's Medium. Maybe.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 12:47 pm

Why are we discussing style of game play again? We know that none of this shit fixes the problems in the game. Are we going to ever actually discuss fixing the problems or are we gonna stay stuck batting style of play back and forth until everyone gets bored?

violence in the media · Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:05 pm

Ok, so where were we before we got off on this tangent then?

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 2:09 pm

MGuy wrote:Why are we discussing style of game play again? We know that none of this shit fixes the problems in the game. Are we going to ever actually discuss fixing the problems or are we gonna stay stuck batting style of play back and forth until everyone gets bored?

Because as stated before, smiting the justifying of incompetence is more productive, useful, and entertaining than talking about anything that starts with the assumption everyone cannot play the fucking game at least half of the time yet is somehow not expected to say fuck this noise and go not play it the rest of the time. Even treating justifying incompetence as if it were a valid and meaningful course of action is still more likely to have positive results than the original subject.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 4:02 pm

Weak justification for simply criticizing someone's style of play for pages and pages at a time. That's all this is. One person likes to play one way someone else likes to do it another. Just say it doesn't fit mechanically and move the fuck on. People are different, will always be different, and different shit will work for different people's games. It will be FAR more productive to actually FIX the game itself than worry about fixing how people Rule 0 it.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:12 pm

Paizil Fallacy. Again.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:49 pm

MGuy wrote:Why are we discussing style of game play again? We know that none of this shit fixes the problems in the game. Are we going to ever actually discuss fixing the problems or are we gonna stay stuck batting style of play back and forth until everyone gets bored?

3E (like 4E) is a mountain of problems and it takes a mountain of house rules to fix. It would take probably 30 pages of this thread just to copy paste all my house rules, probably more.

Fixing the problems of 3.5 isn't going to be done in one thread. It's such a mountain of shit, you really need like several threads dealing with fixing different aspects of the system.

I mean you've seen the Tomes, and they're like at least 100 pages of house rules, probably more. They're also incomplete. Pretty much fixing 3.5 is basically rewriting the entire PHB. You're just not going to do that with one thread.

Basically you're talking about getting a few house rules to give 3.5 the illusion of being playable for a specific group, so things like Competency balancing and such are being discussed.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 10:27 pm

@Roy: Really... Just shut up Roy that doesn't have shit to do with what I said.

@RC: True I don't expect it to be done in one thread but that was the original idea that this thread started with but it has degraded to people arguing basically about whether or not you should Rule 0 your games. It's not even about mechanics or permanently fixing the problems. I'm working on my own project to adjust the game for myself but this argument over "This is the way you should play your game" Isn't going to get anybody anywhere cause its arguing about taste not mechanics.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 2:17 am

MGuy wrote:@Roy: Really... Just shut up Roy that doesn't have shit to do with what I said.

@RC: True I don't expect it to be done in one thread but that was the original idea that this thread started with but it has degraded to people arguing basically about whether or not you should Rule 0 your games. It's not even about mechanics or permanently fixing the problems. I'm working on my own project to adjust the game for myself but this argument over "This is the way you should play your game" Isn't going to get anybody anywhere cause its arguing about taste not mechanics.

To be perfectly fair man, the Den's gone over "rebalancing D&D" more times than I can remember. Go forum-diving for quick fixes or use Tome stuff, because as RC said, there's too much fucked up in the system to solve in one thread and even if it was, there are so many different ways to do it and it's been done so many times that the question becomes less "how do we fix this" and "how do we play with this". That, and the OP's idea has already been shot down for making half the players sit on their hands at any given time.

It was a noble, if misguided attempt at doing something that could have been done with about 30 minutes of time and 10 less pages of derailed thread.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:47 am

Wow. People here don't even know what the Paizil Fallacy is anymore.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:44 am

Roy wrote:Wow. People here don't even know what the Paizil Fallacy is anymore.

I have no idea what it is. Along with a lot of the other memes you use. Honestly I think sometimes you don't even have an argument and just like saying the word "Fail" alot.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:14 am

His fallacy is about facts being written off as opinion. And for some reason he seems to be of the OPINION that you can define what fun as something more than an opinion here.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 12:48 pm

And there he goes again with that Paizil Fallacy. Ya know, dismissing an argument as 'fail' and therefore invalid at least addresses the actual argument, albeit briefly allowing more time for things that actually matter. Whereas what MGuy is doing is the internet equivalent of 'Lalala, we can't hear you!'

And that's the sort of thing that gets even the Gaming 'Suck a barrel of cocks' Den all offended and nerd raging. That should fucking tell you something.

If your statements are offensive to people that practically go around intentionally being as offensive as possible to separate those who can separate the merit of the idea from their spechul feelings towards the speaker and those that cannot, then your statements are fucking terrible, and you should feel terrible. Full fucking stop.

That goes to RC too, because when he isn't constantly justifying incompetence he's wanking off to 4.Fail and other such lazy systems.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:02 pm

Or maybe Roy, you're just a dick. But no of course, you know that right? And I'm sure you have some self justification for being one that totally makes sense to you just like how you just tried to justify labeling something "fail" as doing something productive. However I am not saying "la la la" I'm saying this shit is stupid and arguments over something subjective like fun in an argument about mechanics isn't going to go anywhere.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:32 pm

Roy wrote:And there he goes again with that Paizil Fallacy. Ya know, dismissing an argument as 'fail' and therefore invalid at least addresses the actual argument, albeit briefly allowing more time for things that actually matter.

No it doesn't.

Addressing something as "fail" doesn't even say what you don't like about it. It just makes you sound like a dick who loves using his favorite buzzword. It's not productive to a discussion at all and it makes you sound like a fucking broken record.

When someone comes in and tears down the points of discussion, similar to how Frank or a lot of other posters handle it, that's good, because it promotes people thinking and considering. When you just come in and say "Lolz Epic failz!!!11!!One!!" You're not actually spreading any ideas besides the one that you dont' like it. Of course, given nobody considers you an authority on anything here, I'm not really sure why it would matter if you don't like something. People on this board want actual reasons.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:46 am

MGuy wrote:Or maybe Roy, you're just a dick. But no of course, you know that right? And I'm sure you have some self justification for being one that totally makes sense to you just like how you just tried to justify labeling something "fail" as doing something productive. However I am not saying "la la la" I'm saying this shit is stupid and arguments over something subjective like fun in an argument about mechanics isn't going to go anywhere.

First, accusing anyone on these boards of being a dick is like accusing them of being alive. It's kinda a given, ya know?

Second, you are lalalaing away, as you're still trying to dismiss objective facts (encouraging stupidity means more stupidity, which is bad) as if they were subjective and therefore irrelevant here because you do not like it or do not agree with it.

Third, (this one is to the other failtard as well) starting off a post with 'Fail' and then going on to explain why this is so is called quickly grabbing the audience's attention, and then elaborating. While other words could work for this, Fail is the shortest. Course he's too busy whining and flailing at the meanieface Roy to grasp that, but when and if he ever gets over his little temper tantrum he'll start making sense again.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:01 pm

Firstly: As expected justification for being a dick. Awesome, seems you are very predictable.

Second I'm not lalalaing away allowing for "stupidity". You're just ignoring my point time and time again. By your words I'm saying if being "stupid" is fun for your group, then making concessions for "stupid" game play is justifiable because its a god damn game and you should be trying to have fun. As long as those concessions aren't instituted as actual mechanics who gives a fuck if someone does it or not in their own game?

Thirdly you said this:

Ya know, dismissing an argument as 'fail' and therefore invalid at least addresses the actual argument, albeit briefly allowing more time for things that actually matter.

not this:

starting off a post with 'Fail' and then going on to explain why this is so is called quickly grabbing the audience's attention, and then elaborating.

So please watch your own words because if you meant the latter you should have said so in the first place and not retconned it later as if you'd said it all along.

Oh but I'm sure there will be justification for all three of these. A tweak in meaning here, some ranting there, maybe a personal attack or two thrown in to keep the average up. However my point still stands that in the context of actually balancing the system arguing over this Rule 0 issue doesn't do anything and is pointless.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:17 pm

Hey, anyone else having fun watching Mguy's delusions? Because I'm not. He needs to go die in a fire or something, or otherwise fuck off.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:33 pm

lol wrote:Hey, anyone else having fun watching Roy's delusions? Because I'm not. He needs to go die in a fire or something, or otherwise fuck off.

That works far too well. Stop calling the kettle a [EDITED] Roy.

violence in the media · Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:34 am

MGuy wrote: Second I'm not lalalaing away allowing for "stupidity". You're just ignoring my point time and time again. By your words I'm saying if being "stupid" is fun for your group, then making concessions for "stupid" game play is justifiable because its a god damn game and you should be trying to have fun. As long as those concessions aren't instituted as actual mechanics who gives a fuck if someone does it or not in their own game?

I thought we weren't designing/fixing games for the "stupidity" contingent? Doesn't WotC have that covered already?

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:00 am

That's what I'm saying we shouldn't be doing. This whole CB issue is basically just arguing over whether or not Rule 0 should be used and its not over designing or fixing any of the mechanics. I think another topic should be discussed in this thread like. What to do about Save or Dies. I think there was another thread about it a while back (will check on it after this) about it but I don't think a satisfactory conclusion was was ever reached.

Edit: Here it is.