"Party Composition and Social Skills"

[Absentminded_Wizard]

So how does physical combat in DnD differ from a stat vs stat system? Strength vs Dexterity sounds pretty much like stat vs stat to me.

She may be referring to Frank's stat vs. identical stat of target system. But you're right; D&D physical combat is a stat vs. stat system of a kind--a potentially ludicrously unbalanced kind. If one stat has both offensive and defensive uses, the person who maxes out that stat and uses it for both attack and defense owns everybody. This tendency is mitigated in D&D by the fact that most people get most of their defense from armor or magic of some kind (either items or spells), with the Dex bonus as just a little icing on the cake.

[RandomCasualty]

1122663251[/unixtime]]Stats aren't trumps - it doesn't matter how much you beat someone with your Attack over their Defense if you also then have Damage and Mitigation.

Well actually this is potentially dangerous, because you're never going to be quite sure if +1 attack is better than +1 damage or not. If you don't know that, then balancing a choice between +1 damage stat or +1 attack stat becomes impossible, as does balancing +1 damage resist stat versus +1 AC stat.

The biggest and most important mathematical truth that can exist in your system is that +1 attack = +X damage, where X is some number, hopefully an integer to make balancing easier. It's actually easiest if X=1.

The greatest feat of the SAME system is getting attack and damage to close to a 1:1 tradeoff. Without creating a balance correlation between the attack and damage roll, all the theory behind the basis of SAME just wouldn't work anymore. It's only ok to allow people to choose between strength and agility if those two are both balanced choices. .

In fact the main problem with the 6 stat system I suggested earlier is balancing the three rolls that you'd need. I'm not sure if this can be done, and even if it can, it's going to take some very advanced math to figure out a way to balance them well.

[Crissa]

Why is this 'dangerous', RC?

It simulates highly accurate, but low damage; and highly inaccurate, but high damage. The math is more difficult, but the result is the same, within variances.

Doing damage with your accuracy stat guarantees superiority over a foe without needing tactical intervention.

And I thought the game was about tactics, not dice?

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1122752919[/unixtime]]Why is this 'dangerous', RC?

QUite simply because you aren't sure if trading +1 attack for +1 damage is balanced.

Whenever you allow people to assign stats which represent those two things, you are running into that problem. So you really have to know the answer, otherwise people who invest in damage may be better than those who invest in accuracy or vice versa. The point is that you really don't know until you've done the math. And unless your system happens to be balanced by sheer luck, chances are there's some imbalance, and somewhere down the road someone will uncover it.

The D&D philosohpy was to simply make the damage system so complex and convoluted that hopefully nobody could figure out the correlation between attack and damage. Replacing game balance with misdirection and illusion is a bad paradigm.

Now I'm not saying you can't balance out a paradigm like that.. it's just that you've got to do the math and somewhere down the road you need to be able to say +1 attack = +X damage. IF you can't say that then you simply cannot allow people to distrubte points between accuracy and damage. Not if you want the game to stay balance.

And I thought the game was about tactics, not dice?

This surprisingly isn't even a factor. The game, so long as it uses dice, will be about dice. Random chance will always be a factor so long as you use dice. So the game will always at least be in part about dice, but you really can't control the dice, so you don't really worry about them. As with any game of chance, the best you can do is put the odds in your favor, and that's what tactics and/or character building do.

The question is really about tactics versus character building. Magic the gathering for instance is more about deck building than it is about tactics. Most of your work in M:tG is done before you draw your first card. D&D right now is about character building over tactics. A well designed SAME system could put the emphasis back into tactics. You emphasize tactics when everyone starts relatively even, and controlling character creation min/maxing is the best way to start wtih equality.