4E and the Current Conception of Balance

[Josh_Kablack]

Broken
Broken thing
• Rules that don't function (Brutal 5 dagger, Brutal 4 Vorpal Dagger).
• Any use of the word "infinite". Or "Effectively Infinite"

Okay. Those are broken - with a very small edge case exception on "effectively infinite". If it is difficult to pull off an unlikely loop that lets you do 1 damage repeatedly until the target dies, that's not fundamentally different than having the difficult and unlikely capacity to deal more damage than the enemy has HP via a lucky crit. Both are longshot kills. Sure, one scales up effectively infinitely to give character a chance to use the loop to kill Orcus or whatever - but the PC shouldn't be fighting Orcus if they don't have a chance to win.

• Killing an at-level solo with a single encounter power.

Seeing as an at-level solo is supposed to be a challenger for the whole party and you are "supposed" to have multiple encounter powers in the context of 4e, I can agree with this aside from the case of level 1 and 2 play in games where multiple combats during a single day are rare - which just happens to be the most common case in my own 4e experience. In such a case, there's no meaningful difference between one-shotting a boss monster with a daily or with an encounter power.

I'm also a bit confused by how tight the definitions on "single encounter power" are? Does that mean that one single power combo-ed with class and race features, feats and optimal magic items shouldn't ever be able to kill a solo who has vulnerability to the damage type and his weakest NAD against the attack roll?

Killing an at-level solo with your every-round DPR.

Wait, what? Is this missing text about a stunlock or something?

In the absence of save-or-dies and morale rules, every single encounter is won on DPR vs Healing advantage, and in 4e terms some characters are supposed to be the Strikers what bring the DPR.

Is the intent here to claim that: "if one character by themselves can, on average win against a solo monster, that's a brokenly good character build since it removes the challenge for the other PCs in the party" ? That would be a reasonable claim. I'd disagree with it due to my attitudes about RPGs and ideal difficultly levels and lethality, but I wouldn't be scratching my head in bafflement the way I am now.

Killing all normal monsters in the encounter with a single encounter power.

Assuming "normal" means non-minion, non-elite, non-solo, this is a pretty big deal in 4e terms. However, there is again no meaningful distinctions between Daily and Encounter powers in level 1 and level 2 games with a single fight per day.

[Ice9]

DMs who can't handle PCs getting infinite wishes aren't worthy of the title imo. My players figured out a way to pull it off around level 7-8 without Planeshift or a Candle of Invocation.

Are you kidding? Once you have infinite wishes, you can get as many scrolls of gate or greater planar binding as you want, and just throw infinity solars at anything threat you have. Don't even bother doing missions anymore at that point.

This. People who think that infinite wishes actually work have either not actually considered the effects, or are playing with (possibly unwritten) house-rules like "no using infinite scrolls to smash everything".

[jadagul]

Killing an at-level solo with your every-round DPR.

Wait, what? Is this missing text about a stunlock or something?

In the absence of save-or-dies and morale rules, every single encounter is won on DPR vs Healing advantage, and in 4e terms some characters are supposed to be the Strikers what bring the DPR.

Is the intent here to claim that: "if one character by themselves can, on average win against a solo monster, that's a brokenly good character build since it removes the challenge for the other PCs in the party" ? That would be a reasonable claim. I'd disagree with it due to my attitudes about RPGs and ideal difficultly levels and lethality, but I wouldn't be scratching my head in bafflement the way I am now.

Josh: I think it's supposed to mean "you can kill an at-level solo in a round without using any consumable resources." That is, take your typical DPR that you can keep up for the length of an encounter, and if that number is higher than the HP of a solo something is wrong. If it's bad you can kill a solo with a single encounter power, it's way worse if you can kill it with a single at-will.

[Kaelik]

I understood it to mean "You can kill a solo with your every-round DRP"

Where every-round DPR means the damage you deal every round that you attack.

IE, Twin Strike Ranger can kill 1 solo per round.

[Fuchs]

We play with a sort of houseruled wish economy, now that I think of it - the PCs are supposed to have enough wealth so mundane stuff and minor magical stuff does not matter, though it's understood that anything that affects the game is not included. So, infinite potions of cure wounds are ok, characters can heal up after each fight and no one even cares.

[cthulhu]

The definitions he links to are much better. As you can see he's defining broken as powers that require GM intervention or oversight to manage, which is quite reasonable definition for players that can do by themselves what the entire party combined should be expected to do.

Optimized is the term we use for person five's definition of broken. An optimized option is an option that tends to get a high level of interest but that is not powerful enough that it overshadows most other options. Some people want all options to be balanced enough that every option is equally valid. At this level of broken, this desire is defied.

Overpowered is the term we use for person four's definition of broken. An overpowered option is an option that is so good that it overshadows most other options. However, such options do not disrupt the game beyond making other options inferior. This level of broken may hinder the enjoyment of players that want to be as good as the other players but that wish to choose inferior options for roleplaying or flavor purposes.

Bent is the term we use for person three's definition of broken. A bent option is an option that redefines the games core balancing design. Such options not only overshadow other options as overpowered ones do, they outright create contradictions with core defined terms. The game is still playable at this level, but a new player that has only just read the rule books will be unlikely to realize that many of the statements in the core rulebook are no longer accurate when this option is in play.

Fractured is the term we use for person two's definition of broken. A fractured option is an option that require corrective measures or oversight from the DM to prevent abuse. Such options are so good that they must be fixed or adjusted for if the DM wished to retain as enjoyable of a game. These powers will break the game but are relatively easy to fix without banning.

Finally Shattered is the term we use for person one's definition of broken. A shattered option is so badly broken that it cannot be fixed with a little duct tape. Allowing this option will always break the game and fixing the option is akin to banning it. This term refers to a rule that shatters the game into millions of unplayable pieces.

[Yep]

So... the entire point of this is that bending the system is bad? I'd personally add the caveat that they're bad for groups that don't communicate with each other. If you're playing with some people you should have a pretty basic idea of what level of system fuckery you consider fun as a whole. Otherwise the charopper, in any game, is just playing a retarded nerd dickwaving contest.

Saying that it's somehow always bad for a charopped-as-fuck Feycharger to be able to put out insane damage because it will automatically ruin fun for everyone ever is like saying it's always bad for an optimized caster to exist in 3E; it depends wholly on the group.

[Murtak]

So... the entire point of this is that bending the system is bad? I'd personally add the caveat that they're bad for groups that don't communicate with each other. If you're playing with some people you should have a pretty basic idea of what level of system fuckery you consider fun as a whole. Otherwise the charopper, in any game, is just playing a retarded nerd dickwaving contest.

Saying that it's somehow always bad for a charopped-as-fuck Feycharger to be able to put out insane damage because it will automatically ruin fun for everyone ever is like saying it's always bad for an optimized caster to exist in 3E; it depends wholly on the group.

There is actually quite a few different issues all playing into one another.

1) Characters of disparate power level within the same group cause issues. Lots of them. It takes a lot of work to pull off a fun adventure when someone is always feeling useless. Frequently it fails. This can often be solved by just telling people to make characters of the same people but this in turn requires everyone to understand what actually makes a character powerful and that in turn often depends on the campaign and DM.

2) Some abilities, while not necessarily mechanically broken, do not fit into the portrayed world. Cheap teleportation magic kills caravans, resurrection kills assassination plots, truth magic kills politics. Usually people are decent at ignoring a certain amount of this, but too much will kill immersion.

3) Some abilities entirely break the mechanics of games. Infinite wishes (pre-tome) can make just about anything trivial. Spelldancing loops will give you infinite irresistable spells. Infinite money tricks are too numerous to mention. Polymorph trickery will bring your game to a screeching halt while everyone tries to figure out how this stuff is even supposed to work. After you do figure it out everyone spends a couple more sessions dumpster diving through monster manuals because many encounters can in fact be solved by knowing what to transform into. And then you find out that having all your spells be quickened is not an entirely good idea.

And all of these issues are interlocked. One group spends a month quibbling about polymorph, nearly dissolves over it and ends up banning it. Clearly to them polymorph is the worst spell ever. Broken, confusing and unuseable. Another group's DM rules that polymorph does not grant abilities, enforces unfamiliar body penalties and requires a creature to be known to polymorph into it. To that gaming group, polymorph isn't even a powerful spell. And yet another guy claims that both are wrong, because he remembers a campaign where he figured out that he could escape from prison by transforming into a beholder and disintegrating a path out. Of course he never used it that way again because "Who wants to be a beholder? My character only did that because it was do or die".



All of these - the plain overpowered, the mechanically broken, the confusing, the world alterating - can be solved. And for any given game any ability might be fine as written. But the game's designer should strive to elimiante all of them, because on the other hand each and every problematic ability will cause issues for someone somewhere. Your group may be fine with super chargers. Others may not. And it is not always easy for a DM to explain to player A that he can not both have super cleave and ultra charge when player B has super cleave and player C has ultra charge. Not to mention that this requires putting the most mechanically savy player in charge, which is not always desirable.

[Yep]

Which still boils down to just communicating like rational adults with the people you game with.

[Murtak]

Which still boils down to just communicating like rational adults with the people you game with.

Even assuming that works all the time - which it does not - it still means you can't relate to people in other campaigns. Want to use your character in another campaign? No can do. Want to create a character for another group's game? He will likely be hopelessly over- or underpowered. Also, be prepared to be handed a completely new set of houserules. After that be prepared to be told at least a dozen different houserules no one bothered to write down when they come up in gameplay. And all of that assumes that you can in fact solve everything with communication.

An example:
You are once again playing a band of brave heroes going up against yet another cliched evil necromancer. You silently dispatch some guards and zombies, barricade the twoer doors and surprise the necromancer. But when you kill him his body fades. Your party arcanist figures out that he has been using Astral Projection.

At this point, all hell breaks loose. Player A complains that Astral Projection is way too powerful, since now you have to kill the necromancer twice. Player B complains because Astral Projection ist broken anyway. Player C gleefully contemplates being able to use Astral Projection himself soon. Player D is jabbering about severing his astral cord, while player E informs him that there are no rules about doing so. Meanwhile the DM who was all set to count the rounds until the real necromancer shows up, quietly crumbles up his combat notes.

How do you fix this? Sure eventually everyone will settle on a solution (likely "don't use this spell ever again"), but the encounter and with it the campaign resolution is fucked. Heck, maybe the DM had planned for the necromancer to be expanding onto the astral plane, in which the next campaign arc is fucked too.

[Yep]

Why? If you run into a bit of crunch that the party hates, how does it ruin everything after that? Do you game with people so immature that one instance of dislike is enough for them to swear off anything associated with it forever?

Even in the Astral Projection situation, if the party hates it so vehemently then the DM knows not to use that trick again; spin it as the necromancer expending some hoarded resource that will be effectively impossible to regain just so he could escape the party.

Not to mention it's a pretty standard situation for a DM in the end of your scenario; expecting players to follow your expectations of how they should act will only end in tears.

[Murtak]

Who is talking about ruining everything forever? I am saying that overlooking a broken ability can easily ruin a campaign. Of course you can fix the issue afterwards, but that does nothing to fix what already happened. This goes for any problematic ability of course, even those that are not even overpowered.

Charge builds, for example, tend to one-shot some challenges and do next to nothing to others. Mathemathically there is definitely a point of balance, however both possible outcomes absolutely suck, they just suck in different directions. And just to make things more complicated the very same build may be ok in different party setups. In a party with defense, battlefield control and slow, steady damage chargers will probably not work at all, because they invalidate all other sources of damage. Anything that can withstand a charge is functionally immune to being plinked at for a d6 here and there. In a party where everyone does decent damage however the DM can just use high HP monsters and maybe give them some more HPs on top of that and then run battles that are actually fun.

As for actually mathematically problematic stuff, consider the 3R red wizard DC build. The problem is pretty similar - anything that can resist the red wizard at all is immune to all spells from the rest of the party. How do you fix this after overlooking the issue at character creation? Neuter the red wizard's DCs? That's all the class does. Hand out improved DCs to everyone else? That seems entirely unfair. Have the palyer redesign the character? But he has been a red wizard, defined by his narrow spell selection and high DCs, for months now. The only fix in this situation is to redesign the prestige class, presumably by keeping the narrow spell selection and handing out improved caster levels or free metamagic or whatever. Hardly something you can do on the fly and you may end up shelving your custom prestige class anyway.

Heck, for a really simple example, lets assume someone wants to play a straight druid. He is not the most mechanically inclined of players, so he only discovers mechanical issues piecemeal. Have fun figuring out what he can wildshape into, which abilities he gets, what happens when he wildshapes while being wildshaped, what happens when he buffs while in wildshape and so on. For bonus points, watch everyone's brains explode when they try to figure out the changes going from 3E to 3.5E. Oh, and you better hope the party rogue never finds an amulet of wildshaping and activates it using UMD. Or that the druid takes a level of monk. Polymorph being the fractal mess of mechanics it is there is no single correct answer to how it actually works. The only correct answer of course is to not use polymorph, ever - but then again deprieving the druid of a defining class feature is not exactly something most DMs are prepared to do.

I contend that these issues are not obvious to everyone and as such can and do pop up at times that will ruin entire adventures and campaigns. Of course you can reason out a solution to every single one of these problems, but that does not excuse having them in the first place.

[FatR]

Both "wealth can be straightforwardly converted to power" and "it still can be, but we divide the world into arbitrarily tiers of wealth, with everything powerful traded only for high-tier wealth" are fail. The former because you can't have lost cities of gold in it, the latter because you don't give a fuck about them (as, by the way, is confirmed by example in this thread). The former because you can't sensibly interact with the world's economy without breaking or risking to break the game, the latter because world's economy, or, indeed, everyone in the world below a certain level are completely irrelevant for you. The former falls apart once PCs try to be more than mercenaries, the latter removes a vast swath of reasons for interacting with the setting if PCs are mercenaries (and most of them are).

[Murtak]

You could however have two tiers of wealth where you use one currency to power characters and the other to power kingdoms. The long-lost Ruby City would then be sought by anyone seeking to upgrade their armies or perhaps by those seeking to build their own kingdom or just by some adventurer who wants to be obscenely rich. The well of souls on the other hand is an epic level power source and should not even be accessible to low level chracters. And as long as you don't let people use their crystallized souls to purchase mounds of gold you could potentially have both types of wealth in the same world.