The Tyranny of Fun

[JonSetanta]

K, would a build using a "paralyze-and-kill" tactic be good or bad synergy?

For instance, something using the best of Rogue and Wizard. Hold Person-like effects, something like a scythe, high mobility.

I find it comparable to the fog-and-see-through archer but not sure.

On the flip side these singleminded tactics can have disadvantages; when another build out-does the gimmick, the gimmick-user is screwed... unless they have countermeasures or yet another combo.
The arrangement could lead to a rock-paper-scizzors dynamic between powers, which is fine by me as long as everyone has the availability and resources to acquire at least one of Rock, Paper, and Scizzors.

[Ice9]

Well, giving your character more than one trick is actually a part of synergistic character building. It's in fact a strategic decision how much to specialize vs generalize. If someone wants to make a one-trick pony, I don't see how that's different than wanting to use poor tactics in combat - you get subpar results either way.

Also you mention that retraining takes too long to do during an adventure - does this have to be the case? While large changes to a character probably shouldn't be happening every five minutes, it's entirely possible for small changes to happen on a day to day basis. For example, choosing which spells to prepare as a 3E Cleric/Druid.

Not to mention, there's a lot of ground between "no long term synergy" and "you can put every single feat/power/skill into one single trick", as far as the system is concerned. If a character has, say, ten feats/powers, I don't see a problem putting 3-4 of them into one area - there's still room to have multiple skill areas, and a complete generalist is as dull as a complete specialist.

[K]

K, would a build using a "paralyze-and-kill" tactic be good or bad synergy?

For instance, something using the best of Rogue and Wizard. Hold Person-like effects, something like a scythe, high mobility.

I find it comparable to the fog-and-see-through archer but not sure.

On the flip side these singleminded tactics can have disadvantages; when another build out-does the gimmick, the gimmick-user is screwed... unless they have countermeasures or yet another combo.
The arrangement could lead to a rock-paper-scizzors dynamic between powers, which is fine by me as long as everyone has the availability and resources to acquire at least one of Rock, Paper, and Scizzors.

Yeh, Paralyze and kill fits into the "bad synergy" arena.

What I want to see is every class having Rock, Paper, and Scissors options. I don't want DMs having to say to themselves "Ok, I have two Rocks and two Papers....that means I can't have any Paper encounters because I don't have any PC Scissors and I have to mix up the Scissor and Rock encounters evenly because half the party will be useless or suboptimal in those encounters." It's hard enough to create engaging adventures, so the final system needs to be as easy from the adventure design end as possible.

The only kind of specialization I think is good for the game is thematic specialization. This means that there shouldn't be four things you can put together to get a better Trip or even four different kinds of Trip, but there should be four different Plant powers that your Druid can get that do different things tactically and are countered differently. For example, you might have aGrasping Vine spell that is good vs physically weaker characters, a Pollen Burst spell that attacks mentally weaker characters, and a Briar Field spell that works well against slow characters.

Also, I've been dabbling with ways to give people a small selection of daily choosable powers, but I'll need to get to the powers section before I can tell if that bears any fruit.

[RandomCasualty2]

What I want to see is every class having Rock, Paper, and Scissors options. I don't want DMs having to say to themselves "Ok, I have two Rocks and two Papers....that means I can't have any Paper encounters because I don't have any PC Scissors and I have to mix up the Scissor and Rock encounters evenly because half the party will be useless or suboptimal in those encounters." It's hard enough to create engaging adventures, so the final system needs to be as easy from the adventure design end as possible.

It's tough because with everyone having mixed abilities, it gets closer to 4E where it doesn't really matter what happens. If you lockdown your foe and prevent him from moving, then he switches to ranged attacks, and if his ranged attacks are also a viable choice then you wasted an action locking him down.

What I think we really need is some kind of counter system. Now I don't want an absolute counter system like 3.5 had, where it said "Can you see invisible creatures? No? Then you lose." We also don't want 4E which was based on zero interaction at all. Pretty much effects didn't interact with other effects and you attacked and then they attacked. And there was no way of really preventing or countering anything. Also pretty boring.

Definitely we want interaction, and a lot of it. We also want a lot of options.

Maybe the best model may well be magic the gathering, envisioning each character as a certain "Deck" and every character having his own set of manuever types. Which equate to card types, like sorceries, enchantments, creatures etc. And some decks are suited to countering creatures, others are suited to smashing enchantments and so on. The idea is that a lot of the effects you throw out aren't instantaneous, but rather something lingering.

So lets say for a basic idea we may have stances, enchantments, strikes, boosts, Effects, summons and curses. Now unlike magic, we're not drawing cards, but we may have to select a certain number of default abilities and getting additional effects may take us an action, similar to adaptive style in ToB, which lets you swap out maneuvers for others you know.

Preferably each of these abilities is usable once an encounter. Maybe some of them, like stances can be swapped around at will, but you can only have one out a time. You may have some default at will abilities if you just want to do something basic like throw out damage, but the majority of your effects should be trying to shut down the enemies effects.

Much like regular D&D using one of those abilities takes one of your actions. The idea though is that instead of constantly just targeting the other creature, like in magic, you'd be targeting other abilities more often. For instance, a character casts a charm spell on you, an enchantment, that forces you to do nothing but use a standard action each turn to try to make a save and shake off the charm. One of your allies as a minor action uses "Remove enchantment" which is a once per combat thing that lets him take off an existing enchantment and gets rid of the charm. Another creature may have a stance that says "strikes deal only half damage to you.", and as a counter there could be a necromantic curse effect that prevents a creature from using stances. And so on.

Now, as people get higher in level, you'd have new types of abilities. The main reason for this is because a new type can't easily be removed by the lower level abilities. So while a low level priest may be able to remove an enchantment, he can't do dick about a Dwoemer or a spellweave.

Classes would be like colors in magic, some of them are good at various things. A necromancer might be great at cursing people and killing creatures, but not too useful against dispelling magical effects for instance. Clerics can get rid of curses and fight summoned creatures, but aren't particularly useful at dispelling martial stances and strikes. Sometimes you may even have global effects like in magic, where you remove all stances, or all enchantments, friend and foe alike. Leading to various tactical situations where you may not want to nullify your friend's stoneskin, but you really hate the fire elemental's searing aura, so you have to choose. You may even have Chrono Cross style "Lock black" effects that prevent a character from using abilities of a certain type, like there may well be a "lock fire" that prevents a guy from using any spells with the fire keyword.

Something like that could make for a really cool game I think.

[K]

I think that binary effects of all kinds need to go. Everything should interact in a metagame way like stone to flesh turning a wall into a fleshy wall that can be hacked apart and not like summons where the creature's effect leaves when it does (I had a thread with this idea but it got eaten).

For example, since binary effects can go, you can have people who are not as good at things outside their core competencies and there is still value to their actions. A Warrior's sweeping strike might be a close ranged area effect and not the Warrior's best attack, but it can more than deal with the Druid's entangle(countering it) while damaging the Druid's Animal in melee with him too. Sure, the Wizard could do more damage with his fireball(which would also counter the entangle), but he'd injure the Warrior too.

The Warrior could avoid countering the entangle and use his best attack of a ranged single target piercing strafe and target the Animal or the Druid for more damage and a better chance to wound, but he'd be trading off a lower AC to all attacks for the rest of the round and take some damage because of the uncountered entangle.

Next round the entangle vines deanimate and the Druid can reanimate them with a new entangle or use some other effect.

[Ice9]

What I want to see is every class having Rock, Paper, and Scissors options. ... This means that there shouldn't be four things you can put together to get a better Trip or even four different kinds of Trip ...

I don't think those are mutually exclusive though. To have "Rock Paper Scissors" competence, you don't need every possible type of ability - you just need 2-3 different types of things you're good at, and maybe another couple you're decent at. For instance, someone who can fight well in melee, decently at range, and counter/block magic fairly well has most situations covered - they're not a one-trick pony and it would be very rare they couldn't contribute well to a battle.

So given that you're presumably getting more than 3-4 abilties over the lifetime of the character, what's the problem with spending several of your feats/powers on a particular one? As long as you aren't using all of your resources to do so. This makes a Rock-Paper-Scissors character more like a Rock 3 - Paper 2 - Scissors 4 character, which can actually be more tactically interesting. Pure RPS often comes down to chance against an unknown foe - weighted RPS makes things interesting from the start.

[K]

What I want to see is every class having Rock, Paper, and Scissors options. ... This means that there shouldn't be four things you can put together to get a better Trip or even four different kinds of Trip ...

I don't think those are mutually exclusive though. To have "Rock Paper Scissors" competence, you don't need every possible type of ability - you just need 2-3 different types of things you're good at, and maybe another couple you're decent at. For instance, someone who can fight well in melee, decently at range, and counter/block magic fairly well has most situations covered - they're not a one-trick pony and it would be very rare they couldn't contribute well to a battle.

So given that you're presumably getting more than 3-4 abilties over the lifetime of the character, what's the problem with spending several of your feats/powers on a particular one? As long as you aren't using all of your resources to do so. This makes a Rock-Paper-Scissors character more like a Rock 3 - Paper 2 - Scissors 4 character, which can actually be more tactically interesting. Pure RPS often comes down to chance against an unknown foe - weighted RPS makes things interesting from the start.

At the core, this is the why the level-based system doesn't work well in DnD. People focus on the things that their character is already good at doing. So, if we assume that feats add +1 to each one, we'd get a situation where the Scissor 4 character is putting all his feats into Scissors, making it a Scissors 8 attack. If you took the same base character who has Rock 3, Paper 2 and Scissors 4 and he spread the wealth around he might look like a Paper 4, Rock 4, Scissors 5 and he'd have powers three or four less than the other guy's best power.

Now, let's run those guys in an adventure. The Scissors 8 guy is going to knock down things stupidly well when he can use Scissors, and the other guy is only marginally better when Rock or Paper are the best choice.

Now, that doesn't mean people shouldn't specialize. If you are a melee character you should have an option to pick up a bunch of powers useful in melee. The key is that those powers can't be individually much more powerful than the melee powers an archer will pick up. A marginal bulge adds variety, but any more and you start having to set your encounters to Scissors 8 and thus render meaningless any character built at 4 or 5 as well as pissing off the Scissors guy every time his power is rendered meaningless.

3.X DnD's greatest flaw was that inherent in the rules set is the ability for specific builds to render meaningless the power granted by level, which for a level-based game meant that people cried "broken" every time a good build trumped a poor or standard one(and rightfully so).

Asymmetric power is bad for the game.

[Ice9]

people cried "broken" every time a good build trumped a poor or standard one(and rightfully so).

So if people cry "broken" when a character with good combat tactics trumps a character with poor combat tactics, will it also be rightfully so? Having meaningful choice means the ability to pick better or worse choices. We can either let people learn from poor choices and retrain them, or we can make character creation a cosmetic decision.

And as I've said before - allowing Scissors to stack up to 3 or 4 does not mean it has to stack up indefinitely. Someone putting all their points into Scissors isn't going to be a problem if the system doesn't let them, and the system can do that without disallowing stacking entirely.

[RandomCasualty2]

Next round the entangle vines deanimate and the Druid can reanimate them with a new entangle or use some other effect.

Actually I think this is exactly the situation we want to avoid.

If anything we should go with once per encounter powers, or at the very least abilities that require that you use an action to recharge them. That way, people can sorta specialize in a given ability, but it doesn't break the game because then there's no way to just spam one ability.

Spamming really needs to be discouraged I think, and we want once/encounter and recharge based abilities, mainly because they add a new level of depth in terms of resource management, especially in a counter system. That way when you've got your dispel magic or whatever, you generally want to wait until you've got something meaningful to dispel, instead of just dispelling everything in sight for instance.

It also makes being a specialist a bit more helpful since a fire mage has a bunch of fire gimmicks he can use in an encounter, but a generalist may only have a once/encounter fireball and then he's tapped out.

[K]

people cried "broken" every time a good build trumped a poor or standard one(and rightfully so).

So if people cry "broken" when a character with good combat tactics trumps a character with poor combat tactics, will it also be rightfully so? Having meaningful choice means the ability to pick better or worse choices. We can either let people learn from poor choices and retrain them, or we can make character creation a cosmetic decision.

And as I've said before - allowing Scissors to stack up to 3 or 4 does not mean it has to stack up indefinitely. Someone putting all their points into Scissors isn't going to be a problem if the system doesn't let them, and the system can do that without disallowing stacking entirely.

But it is still asymmetric power. Still bad.

People need to get a bunch of tactics and a variety of tactics. Good players will pick the right tactics for the situation and bad ones will pick the wrong ones. That's game mastery at its core, and you want bad choices to be suboptimal. What you don't want is for characters to not have a good choice or to have only a marginal choice because someone else decided to overspecialize and all encounters need to be cranked up to match the overspecialization.

That being said, playing DnD is not and should not be about character building and rebuilding. People should have the option to drop powers that aren't fun and replace them with fun ones; they should not be asked to read the DM's mind before every adventure and rebuild their character to suit the proposed adventure. That's a waste of player time that could be better spend learning the intricacies of their own character's tactical choices, spent dreaming up RP ideas, or just spent playing the game. In essence, that's bad game mastery that adds nothing to other player's enjoyment of the game.

I know that it is a common thing for players to go OCD on their games and expend vast amounts of time on deck-building or character building. I just don't think that it adds anything to the game, especially when that option already exists in a balanced form simply by choosing selectable powers that are tied to level. "Build"-based gaming may be fine for CO board thought exercises, but it doesn't really make the game more fun or more tactically interesting for anyone but the builder because it forces other characters to overspecialize just to keep up and that just is not fun because lots of gamers don't like it, can't do it, or both.

Why do you think there is a divide between COers and RPers and each call the other idiot because the RPer spends ranks in Craft(Woodworking) and the COer spent every feat and skill to qualify for a single uber-schtick? Neither one is wrong, but both are victims of the system.

People need to spend time figuring out how to beat their adventures and have more fun, not figuring out how to break the game. I'd honestly be happy if I never again read a "triptastic fighter" or "diplomancer" build thread and was instead left with "what are good tactics for this situation" or "how do I make this more fun" threads.

[K]

Next round the entangle vines deanimate and the Druid can reanimate them with a new entangle or use some other effect.

Actually I think this is exactly the situation we want to avoid.

If anything we should go with once per encounter powers, or at the very least abilities that require that you use an action to recharge them. That way, people can sorta specialize in a given ability, but it doesn't break the game because then there's no way to just spam one ability.

Spamming really needs to be discouraged I think, and we want once/encounter and recharge based abilities, mainly because they add a new level of depth in terms of resource management, especially in a counter system. That way when you've got your dispel magic or whatever, you generally want to wait until you've got something meaningful to dispel, instead of just dispelling everything in sight for instance.

It also makes being a specialist a bit more helpful since a fire mage has a bunch of fire gimmicks he can use in an encounter, but a generalist may only have a once/encounter fireball and then he's tapped out.

First, there is no way that per encounter stuff works. I personally have never heard a good explanation of what an "encounter" is and thus it seems metagame and artificial as well as being useless.

Second, if abilities naturally counter each other as a default then spamming is naturally discouraged. In the example a Druid can spend an action each round to toss another entangle that lasts one round, but he could be countered by the Warrior's Sweeping Strike every round so he's going to die soon having done no damage if he doesn't come up with something better.

That being said, I don't care if someone spams. Sometimes the situation calls for six fireballs and sometimes it calls for a mix of moves and countermoves. If each ability is built so that it occupies a certain tactical niche, it is only the fault of the DM if spamming one ability is the best tactical choice.

[MartinHarper]

First, there is no way that per encounter stuff works. I personally have never heard a good explanation of what an "encounter" is and thus it seems metagame and artificial as well as being useless.

I think "every X minutes" is a reasonable "per encounter" definition. X=5 is 4e, but anything longer than the length of most long fights works.

If each ability is built so that it occupies a certain tactical niche, it is only the fault of the DM if spamming one ability is the best tactical choice.

Part of the problem with 4e is the issue with wizards spamming magic missile after round 3. A good DM can alleviate this in various ways. I'd prefer if the system gave rise to non-trivial tactics even with an average DM, so a good DM can organise things to give rise to genuinely interesting tactical choices, rather than fighting the system just to make things not dull.

I'd be fine with something as simple as a one round cooldown on most actions, so that folks get to alternate attack forms even if the DM sucks completely.

[JonSetanta]

I think "every X minutes" is a reasonable "per encounter" definition. X=5 is 4e, but anything longer than the length of most long fights works.

In the Tome of Battle it's the same duration. 5 minutes. Probably where the 4e idea of per-encounter began, really.

I've been dabbling with a variable recovery time for another system although it easily applies here as well.
Right now 1d4 +X minutes looks good but deciding what X should be could either be a set value, dependent upon exertion in the previous combat or other conditions such as wound points, or perhaps even decrease time depending on a matching stat or few.

Regardless, a variable rest time removes that mechanical predictability that stating "DING! 5 minutes up. Your powers are back." tends to have.

Expendable items such as 'mana potions' could recover a person as if they had rested, but actual abilities should NEVER EVER allow actual rest.
That way leads to an abusable infinite loop hell.

[K]

Part of the problem with 4e is the issue with wizards spamming magic missile after round 3. A good DM can alleviate this in various ways. I'd prefer if the system gave rise to non-trivial tactics even with an average DM, so a good DM can organise things to give rise to genuinely interesting tactical choices, rather than fighting the system just to make things not dull.

4e only gives each character a few spammable powers and a pile of powers that are quickly used up, so of course people in long combats(read, all 4e combats) will spam those powers. It is a natural result of the system.

A better example is the 3e Warlock. It doesn't matter if all of his powers are all spammable because the powers he has are specifically made to not break when spammed.

Considering how well the Warlock works, I don't see any advantage to complex or simple recharge schemes. It's merely one more thing to remember in combat that doesn't make the game more fun.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

First, there is no way that per encounter stuff works. I personally have never heard a good explanation of what an "encounter" is and thus it seems metagame and artificial as well as being useless.

I think "every X minutes" is a reasonable "per encounter" definition. X=5 is 4e, but anything longer than the length of most long fights works.

Actually, in 4e X = Length of fight + 5 minutes of rest. It's almost a throwback to (at least some versions of) the Colored Boxes, where every fight was assumed to take 10 minutes for ease of DM timekeeping. But if the clock doesn't start ticking until after the fight's over, the length of recharge time in relation to the average long fight doesn't matter. I'd say it's better to have the clock start after the fight, since fixed recharge times introduce even more bookkeeping into combat.

[virgil]

Except that you don't really have a fixed point at which the fight is over sometimes, so (fight + 5 minutes) is the same thing as (encounter) as far as vagueness. If you're gung-ho about it, require active rest for 1 minute or some other fixed time, rather than walking along and exploding in encounter resets.

[Ice9]

What you don't want is for characters to not have a good choice or to have only a marginal choice because someone else decided to overspecialize and all encounters need to be cranked up to match the overspecialization.

So what you're saying is that any level of specialization beyond spending one feat/power out of a dozen or more, is overspecialization? You don't need over a dozen different fields of competence to avoid being a one-trick pony. If you have 20+ abilities, putting 4 or 5 of them into one power isn't overspecialization, it's normal specialization.

That's a waste of player time that could be better spend learning the intricacies of their own character's tactical choices, spent dreaming up RP ideas, or just spent playing the game.

There is a legitimate distinction here between the game as entertainment and the game as a hobby. For entertainment purposes, you don't want to have to think about the game at all before you start playing it. For hobby purposes, it's the opposite.

However, spending time "learning the intricacies of their own character's tactical choices" doesn't sound like an entertainment-based choice either. If people want to spend time outside the game thinking about it, why is thinking about tactics good and thinking about character contruction bad? They're both ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things.

"Build"-based gaming may be fine for CO board thought exercises, but it doesn't really make the game more fun or more tactically interesting for anyone but the builder because it forces other characters to overspecialize just to keep up and that just is not fun because lots of gamers don't like it, can't do it, or both.

"Tactics"-based gaming may be fine for wargaming thought exercises, but it doesn't really make the game more fun or more interesting for anyone but tacticians because it forces other players to be tactically focussed just to keep up and that just is not fun because lots of gamers don't like it, can't do it, or both

Bottom line, you like tactics but you don't like strategic character construction. I like both. Some people don't like either one. What makes one objectively better than the other?

[K]

Bottom line, you like tactics but you don't like strategic character construction. I like both. Some people don't like either one. What makes one objectively better than the other?

Building a "selectable powers" character takes minutes and building a synergistic character takes at least an hour on top of the weeks of research (or vast encyclopedic knowledge). That's more a burden to DMs, but it's an important stumbling block.

Second: when you say "power X is bigger when I use it instead of him even though we are the same level", then you've introduced unbalance to the game. Maybe your game can survive that unbalance if it's small enough, but the given the difficulties in balancing characters already, what is the advantage, especially considering the increased chance of unexpected synergies?

Third: as more supplements come out, people will seek out the new synergies. For example, it won't be enough to have a kobold Sorcerer, so you'll need to undergo a magic ritual to become a Dragonborn because that's way better for Sorcerers. That's a burden to DMs.

Fourth, there is less of an incentive to "minor" in anything. People with a shred of CO blood will invest as heavily as they can in as few things as possible, and that makes for inorganic characters that are less fun to play and potentially useless in more situations ("yeh, I put all my ranks into Ride and Jump because I'm not the party face and I tanked Cha and so don't need Diplomacy.").

Fifth, longer design times. Yeh, once you write a new ability you have to worry about every ability ever published that could potentially increase its power in order to figure out if it's balanced.

Sixth, strategic character creation is hard, and the average gamer at the table can't even do it. Frank and I can whip out a playable warrior in under ten minutes(and have done so when pressed), but we are also so well versed in DnD that it borders on an unhealthy obsession. Expecting that kind of thing from the DM's girlfriend or a newb is as unrealistic as it is unkind (and those kinds of players often come up with interesting tactics since they don't know any better).

Seventh, where is the advantage? I mean, some people like it, but that's never been a good reason to do things (see purchasable magic items, Decks of Many Things, taint mechanics, Gygaxian traps, etc).

Eighth, as long as you give people the ability to specialize in other ways, they won't even miss the fact that they can't super-specialize and overclock single powers. Variety and choice are important, but few miss superpowers when they have lots of shiny powers.

Ninth, game mastery is inevitable, but rewarding game mastery that comes from copying and pasting something from a message board invalidates actual game mastery that comes from strategic thinking and creativity that can only be done when paying attention to the game being played. So yeh, strategic character building leads to Smash Brothers because it encourages the well-specialized characters to "cruise-control" part of the adventure to give other people a chance to shine.

Tenth, some character options just won't be as viable and so won't be played (name the last time you saw a half-orc sorcerer, even though it's just a few points). Some people don't mind that, but I think it takes more from the game than it adds.

[K]

That's a waste of player time that could be better spend learning the intricacies of their own character's tactical choices, spent dreaming up RP ideas, or just spent playing the game.

There is a legitimate distinction here between the game as entertainment and the game as a hobby. For entertainment purposes, you don't want to have to think about the game at all before you start playing it. For hobby purposes, it's the opposite.

However, spending time "learning the intricacies of their own character's tactical choices" doesn't sound like an entertainment-based choice either. If people want to spend time outside the game thinking about it, why is thinking about tactics good and thinking about character contruction bad? They're both ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Not so. Creative use of your powers makes for lively and surprising adventures. Dreaming up good uses of powers means that you always have a good surprise up your sleave.

Well designed characters not surprising. You walk in and are good. You don't even have to try to be good because you already know what you are good at because it's written on your sheet.

In fact, if you are already good don't want to do surprising things too often because then people accuse you of being too good and they can point to your character sheet to prove it ("why is your fighter doing more damage than my fighter and he has a better AC and more HPs?").

[Ice9]

Not so. Creative use of your powers makes for lively and surprising adventures. Dreaming up good uses of powers means that you always have a good surprise up your sleave.

My wording was a bit off here - when I said "not entertainment-based", I didn't mean "not entertaining", I meant "requires time outside gameplay" - perfect for D&D as a hobby, questionable for D&D as quick entertainment.

(Ten things)

Some responses to these:

1) Building a synergistic character often takes longer than a non-synergistic one, certainly. Playing a battle with complex tactics takes longer than one with simple/no tactics. That's the trade-off in both cases, and building a character happens a lot less frequently than battles do.

2) How is this any more of an imbalance than, say, a warrior dealing more damage in melee than a summoner does? The only imbalance would be if your powers as a whole were stronger than their's.

3) This applies whether or not there's synergy in character elements. If the stuff in supplements is stronger, players will probably want to use it, either to synergize with or replace their existing character elements.

4) As I've said about five times now, allowing stacking does not mean allowing unlimited stacking. If you can only put 1/3 of your resources into your main area, that's 2/3 of your resources that goes into "minoring" in things.

5) In any case, you'd still have to consider how it interacts with every other ability in gameplay.

6) For some people, tactical gameplay is hard. In fact, it's possible for to make a character for someone based on their general concept, but you can't play that character for them.

7) Where's the advantage for anything? Why have roleplaying? Why have tactics? Why have monsters or adventures or treasure? If we just throw all that stuff out, think how efficient the system will be!

8 ) 4E tried that ... forget about the fact you can't trip or disarm people anymore and your damage is "padded sumo" scale - you have strikes with names!

9) So because some people are uncreative when building a character, it should be trashed? I guess roleplaying should be trashed too, because some people ham it up with cliches.

10) Some combat tactics aren't as viable when you have detailed tactical rules. That fancy rope swinging, table kicking over, sword spinning manuever that sounded cool might actually turn out to be a waste of time, depending on the rules. Stalking around the edges of the battle lining up the perfect shot might mean you actually accomplish very little. The price of having meaningful choices is that some of those choices are better than others.

It might seem like I'm anti-tactics here - nothing could be further from the truth. But there are a lot of similarities between detailed tactical combat and strategic character creation. They both:
* Make the game better if you like them, add nothing if you don't.
* Slow things down (combat and character creation, respectively).
* Reward making the stronger choices, which might often the same ones.
* Penalize making weaker choices that seem cool.
* Require some experience with the system (or help) to get good results.
* Add more depth to their part of the game.

[Draco_Argentum]

I agree with K's main point. The moment you can synergise to get a numerically superior option the whole game needs to take that into account for balance. If we let trip fighters get a +20 then enemies need to be designed with that in mind. Then the guy with only +10 can just fuck off.

[Manxome]

A few remarks:


1) Deep characters design != allowing specialization.

In fact, in many ways, the more you can specialize, the less actual creativity you can exercise in character creation, because of course you're going to invest tons of resources in making your main schtick better (because then you're benefitting from all your character resources at once, rather than picking and choosing); it's simply a matter of researching what all your options are so you can figure out how to get the maximum bonus.

Conversely, if your only options are to pick up abilities that don't simply stack, then you have to think about tactics and analyze synergies and try to figure out whether invisibility or fly is going to do a better job of saving your skin in the situations where simply chucking your fireball won't win the day.

The option "I can have fewer spells on my spell list in order to make the spells I actually have deal more damage" probably doesn't add much depth.


2) Half-way rules add complexity.

I'm sure you can write a system that allows you to spend up to 30% of your character resources on one schtick but not more, but that will be more complicated than the alternatives. If there are no abilities that stack, then obviously, you can't spend all your resources on stacking together one uber-attack. If there are stacking abilities, and no special rules, then you can. To achieve a system where you can stack up 3 abilities but not 4 means either that you wrote exactly 3 stacking abilities and will never, ever write any more, or that you have some special "maximum stack size" rule that everyone needs to learn and remember. And you need to make sure that you don't write any abilities that open up loopholes in the maximum stack size.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea, but I think it means that the burden of proof is to demonstrate that the rule adds enough to the game to justify its existence, not to come up with reasons why we should keep it out.


I don't think K is against having abilities that synergize, like, say, an ability that immobilizes melee opponents and a ranged attack, or a stealth ability and a sneak attack. He just doesn't seem to like the idea that one person spent character resources to chuck fireballs and another character spent more resources to chuck bigger fireballs at the same level. Ice9 has made some good points, but in terms of overall philosophy, I think I'm with K thus far.

[RandomCasualty2]

Sixth, strategic character creation is hard, and the average gamer at the table can't even do it. Frank and I can whip out a playable warrior in under ten minutes(and have done so when pressed), but we are also so well versed in DnD that it borders on an unhealthy obsession. Expecting that kind of thing from the DM's girlfriend or a newb is as unrealistic as it is unkind (and those kinds of players often come up with interesting tactics since they don't know any better).

Yeah, strategic character creation is bad. It's one thing that really needs to be eliminated. Especially what needs to be gotten rid of is character build planning. At no point should it be okay to have 10 dexterity at 1st level, but later down the road you get fucked unless you read ahead. It's one thing I noticed about 4E that sucks. There are literally ability scores that do nothing for you until epic level, then you fucking need them. And that's just terrible design.

Under no circumstances should you need to plan ahead. At all. I almost want to get rid of all prerequisites entirely except for character level.

Ninth, game mastery is inevitable, but rewarding game mastery that comes from copying and pasting something from a message board invalidates actual game mastery that comes from strategic thinking and creativity that can only be done when paying attention to the game being played.

Yeah, any game mastery should be during actual play in terms of good tactics and creative thought and not just spamming some uber build combo ability that you super specialized in to no end.

[K]

(
Some responses to these:1) Building a synergistic character often takes longer than a non-synergistic one, certainly. Playing a battle with complex tactics takes longer than one with simple/no tactics. That's the trade-off in both cases, and building a character happens a lot less frequently than battles do.

2) How is this any more of an imbalance than, say, a warrior dealing more damage in melee than a summoner does? The only imbalance would be if your powers as a whole were stronger than their's.

3) This applies whether or not there's synergy in character elements. If the stuff in supplements is stronger, players will probably want to use it, either to synergize with or replace their existing character elements.

4) As I've said about five times now, allowing stacking does not mean allowing unlimited stacking. If you can only put 1/3 of your resources into your main area, that's 2/3 of your resources that goes into "minoring" in things.

Assuming each power is its own tactical niche, the point is that the character who spent 1/3 of his stuff on specializing is actually down 1/3 the tactics of the character who didn't AND he is potentially game-breakingly better than the guy who didn't focus his resources. Making him weaker in some areas and stronger than other is bad for his vaiability as a character.

That's why some characters will be given certain aptitudes prebuild(like fighters automatically doing more damage than Wizards with fighter abilities). Pre-building that bulge is only balanced because everyone is doing it. Once you make it possilble for someone to not do it, you game is on a slippery slope to unbalance.

5) In any case, you'd still have to consider how it interacts with every other ability in gameplay.

No, you don't. You really can just make each ability an island since things will fall into broad categories. I mean, once I know how a Wall of Stone tactically works I pretty much know how a Wall of Force works.

6) For some people, tactical gameplay is hard. In fact, it's possible for to make a character for someone based on their general concept, but you can't play that character for them.

But trying out new tactics in combat is easy. Rebuilding your character for new synergies is time-consuming and hard on the story.

7) Where's the advantage for anything? Why have roleplaying? Why have tactics? Why have monsters or adventures or treasure? If we just throw all that stuff out, think how efficient the system will be!

Don't blame me if strategic building is counterproductive to enjoyable gaming.

Lots of the things are cliches in gaming and they make it more fun. This is not one of those.

8 ) 4E tried that ... forget about the fact you can't trip or disarm people anymore and your damage is "padded sumo" scale - you have strikes with names!

And it works. Sadly, they also had a failure of creativity and made only 7-8 tactics possible in hundreds of nearly identical permutations.

9) So because some people are uncreative when building a character, it should be trashed? I guess roleplaying should be trashed too, because some people ham it up with cliches.

10) Some combat tactics aren't as viable when you have detailed tactical rules. That fancy rope swinging, table kicking over, sword spinning manuever that sounded cool might actually turn out to be a waste of time, depending on the rules. Stalking around the edges of the battle lining up the perfect shot might mean you actually accomplish very little. The price of having meaningful choices is that some of those choices are better than others.

The key is to make things not as good in certain circumstances and not just objectively bad in all circumstances.

I mean, if you make Swashbuckling in all ways inferior to Sniping, then don't be surprised that people never take Sniping. That's just bad design.

But, if you make Sniping good in combats vs. Large creatures and Ok vs other creatures and Swashbuckling good vs medium an smaller creatures and Ok vs the rest, then there are real tactical choices to be made, especially in situations with mixed forces.

[Ice9]

I don't think K is against having abilities that synergize, like, say, an ability that immobilizes melee opponents and a ranged attack, or a stealth ability and a sneak attack.

Yeh, Paralyze and kill fits into the "bad synergy" arena.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that seems to be exactly what he's saying - not only should abilties not be numerically synergistic, they shouldn't have any synergy at all.

When you combine that with having a large number of feats/powers, and not being able to combine any of them, every character has to have many areas of expertise. I'm not talking "good with melee, good with archery, decent with rituals", I'm talking "adequate with melee, archery, fire magic, rituals, grappling, enchantment, acrobatic leaping, alchemical weapons, scrying, and mounted combat" - and really, no better at any one of those than they are at the rest. How exactly is a jack-of-all-trades character inherently more interesting than one that's focussed in a few areas?

Sure, you could take a dozen different variants of melee abilities, but there's no reason to do so - a mix-and-match approach lets you cherry-pick the best abilities of each type. And speaking of balance difficulties, this means that if one ability of a given type is slightly better, it will eclipse all the others in that area.


And also:

No, you don't. You really can just make each ability an island since things will fall into broad categories. I mean, once I know how a Wall of Stone tactically works I pretty much know how a Wall of Force works.

The same can be said for how abilties synergize with each-other.