Design philosophies that make you rage?

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:43 am

Roy wrote:And the Epic Fail is indeed Epic.

I note you ignored my challenge to provide focus fire based source material.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:15 pm

Cross the streams!

Cielingcat · Post by **Cielingcat** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:32 pm

As an extension of Frank's "substandard options for above standard options" example, I pose the common argument by WoW players of "my class sucked in the past, and therefore deserves to be better than anyone else now." This also applies to Wizards in whatever edition where they sucked early on and became gods by mid levels.

Suck now for power later is horrible, and it makes the game always unbalanced, all the time.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:47 pm

Related to Cielingcat's point, I hate the false dichtomy D&D has a hardon for involving combat and non-combat. That is, if you want to be good at one you have to be bad at the other. This is especially infuriating when you consider 1) this is inconsistently applied (hello 3E rogue, 4E ranger) and 2) D&D expressly values the combat portion of the game over the non-combat portion.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:30 pm

Suck now for power later is horrible, and it makes the game always unbalanced, all the time.

Not really. It honestly depends on how combat-focused the game is, how sucky your character is overall, and how much the power overshadows other players.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:57 pm

It really is a horrible balancing mechanism Psychic Robot.

Suck in one area for strength in another is ok. That's across domains though, which is not the same thing as levels.

Suck in one level so that your god in another is always bad, since that violates 90% of the point behind levels in the first place (making sure everyone is equally effective). So sucking now for godliness later, well, sucks.

Lago: being worse at combat to be better at non-combat is fine as long as we don't hit the extremes. The goal is to make players equally effective, not equally good in combat.

1) 3.x has a hard time knowing what balance among classes is at all. *waves to wizard, cleric, and druid*. So dnd is not very representative of combat vs. non-combat. It's more class vs. class, where we have fighters on one end and clerics on another.

2) Which means that the combat portion should be weighted more heavily, and the differences between classes in combat should be slight, where as the differences between classes out of combat can be larger (although not too large).

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:04 pm

It really is a horrible balancing mechanism Psychic Robot.

Suck in one area for strength in another is ok. That's across domains though, which is not the same thing as levels.

Oh, I agree that it's a terrible balancing mechanism. Some games don't care about balance, though, and some people don't because the characters don't autowin the game (even if they can).

koz · Post by **koz** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:04 pm

PR, games which don't care about being balanced are not worth playing. Honestly, your attitude is beginning to resemble Kev Siembieda, with fewer ego stains. This is not a good thing.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:14 pm

I've actually seen focus fire reasonably often, but mostly in space combat books. It makes more sense there because 1) space ships tend to take a beating before dying, and 2) communications are generally faster than fire rates.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:22 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:This is not a good thing.

He has developed a bad case of 2e D&D. Every opinion he tries to express is a clumsy rehashing of the bad old days of 2e D&D fanboyism.

I find it puzzling since in theory he could just track down some 2e rule books and use them.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:24 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:PR, games which don't care about being balances are not worth playing. Honestly, your attitude is beginning to resemble Kev Siembieda, with fewer ego stains. This is not a good thing.

Sure, they are. You play 3e, don't you? While 3e technically "cares" about balance, it's mostly lip-service and druid wanking. The fact is, if the game says, "Magic is more powerful than swinging a sword, but wizards are hated, feared, and usually chased around by villagers with flaming pitchforks," then that's balance. It's not mechanical balance, not in the way that we think of it, but it's balanced. Sure, the wizard gets to shoot lasers and turn people to pillars of salt, but he's also an outcast, which means that he doesn't get to use his powers in front of strangers. If the DM runs a campaign in the woods and it's centered around killing ogres, then, yeah, the wizard is going to be more powerful, and that kind of sucks for the fighter, but that's what happens when one person spends years studying to wield the ultimate power of the cosmos and the other person learns to hit things.

Non-casters shouldn't ever be able to throw fireballs, and that's just unbalanced because the fighter is never going to be able to hit every opponent in a 20' radius with an attack that does damage even on a miss. And that's okay, because it would be retarded for the fighter to throw a fireball.

Screentime is more important than pluses and minuses. If you spend 3/4 of the game time bribing nobles and speaking with the king, it doesn't really matter that the wizard is firebombing whole villages that other 1/4 of the time.

And don't get me wrong, I love 3e, and I want to play a more balanced version of it, but when you focus on balance to the exclusion of everything else, you end up with 4e, which is bland, and still unbalanced, and it sucks because I can't play the character I want to because that character has a familiar, and that makes the economy of actions cry, which makes the game break, and I don't really care about that because I just want my goddamn familiar.

Absentminded_Wizard · Post by **Absentminded_Wizard** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:09 am

Cielingcat wrote:As an extension of Frank's "substandard options for above standard options" example, I pose the common argument by WoW players of "my class sucked in the past, and therefore deserves to be better than anyone else now." This also applies to Wizards in whatever edition where they sucked early on and became gods by mid levels.

Suck now for power later is horrible, and it makes the game always unbalanced, all the time.

Another version of this is "this class sucked in the last edition, so it must rule this one." See 2e vs. 3.x cleric and 2e vs 3.x (core) bard.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:21 am

Psychic Robot wrote:And don't get me wrong, I love 3e, and I want to play a more balanced version of it, but when you focus on balance to the exclusion of everything else, you end up with 4e, which is bland, and still unbalanced

Bullshit. 4E is crap, that's all. It is obviously possible to make the game more varied, more balanced and easier to understand at the same time. The 2E to 3E conversion proved that. Yes, 3rd edition is still unbalanced. But it is multiple orders of magnitude better than 2nd edition. 4th is not bad because all they care about is balance, it is bad because they did a shitty job and did not even bother to playtest it.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:31 am

The reason I hate 4e isn't because it's unbalanced; it's because it's boring. According to 4e, doing damage is an interesting class feature.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:01 am

Again: This is not a failing caused by "too much balancing" it is a failing caused by "bad design".

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:27 am

Murtak wrote:Again: This is not a failing caused by "too much balancing" it is a failing caused by "bad design".

I like to call it "lazy man's balancing". Just make everything the same and move a couple of numbers around.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:48 am

Murtak wrote:Again: This is not a failing caused by "too much balancing" it is a failing caused by "bad design".

How can you balance a character with an animal companion, a character that can shoot fireballs, and a character that swings a sword? You can't, at least not in a way that's going to make them perfectly balanced. Shooting fireballs is automatically better than swinging a sword, at least in a not-4e world.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 12:09 pm

Again, bullshit.

Fireball
Everyone adjacent to you has to make a Reflex save. Those that fail take 1d fire damage.

Swording
All opponents within 10 feet take 60d6 damage.

And you say fireballs are always better?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 12:51 pm

Fireballs and sword attacks just kill fools. A sword attack inherently strikes one enemy and a fiery explosion inherently strikes several opponents. So sword attacks are an example of a Focus Fire attack, while fire balls are an example of a distributed attack. Since all of the damage done by a sword attack is done to one enemy, after causing an equal amount of damage the sword will have reduced the number of enemies more than the explosions will have.

So now that we've established that Roy feels that it is totally unreasonable for the sword to not be in all ways preferable to the fiery explosion, and that PsychicRobot feels that it is totally unreasonable for the explosion to not be in all ways superior to the sword; I believe that we can conclude that the two of them need to have a hyperbole fight.

Roy: There is obviously no way that an unfocused area attack could ever compete with a single target concentrated attack, because removing the next enemy from the field is of paramount importance at all time and minimizes the number of attacks you receive in the upcoming round.

PR: There is obviously no way that a focused attack can compete with an area attack, because the area attack damages more enemies and damaging more enemies makes you more important on the battlefield.

It's almost like there's some kind of completely obvious tradeoff between doing more damage to a single enemy and doing more total damage that would make either attack style defensible as a character choice in different circumstances.

-Username17

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 6:09 pm

Murtak wrote:Again, bullshit.

Fireball
Everyone adjacent to you has to make a Reflex save. Those that fail take 1d fire damage.

Swording
All opponents within 10 feet take 60d6 damage.

And you say fireballs are always better?

That's beyond retarded, and the only place that would function is in 4e land.

It's almost like there's some kind of completely obvious tradeoff between doing more damage to a single enemy and doing more total damage that would make either attack style defensible as a character choice in different circumstances.

You're forgetting that you get +1 cool points for shooting fire. The fighter gets sacked with -1 cool points for being a dong.

Cielingcat · Post by **Cielingcat** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 6:24 pm

What the fuck, PR? What are you even saying? "That would only function in 4e land"?

No. Absolutely no. That makes no sense, and you are making no sense. While it is indeed beyond retarded to make things that ridiculously different in power, it has absolutely nothing to do with 4e or not 4e.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 6:55 pm

The idea that fireballs suck because it would make the fighter feel like he has a small penis is the mentality that I can only fathom in 4e land.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:03 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:The idea that fireballs suck because it would make the fighter feel like he has a small penis is the mentality that I can only fathom in 4e land.

That's not the idea. At all. Fireballs suck in Shadowrun because they aren't particularly bigger than hand grenades and you pay drain now when you're in the middle of combat and a hand grenade costs you time and effort last week when you were preparing for your ninja assault and had time to burn.

A burst of magical fire is just a magical attack. Whether it's better, worse, or the same as a physical attack is entirely contingent on its parameters. There is nothing inherent about the concept of magical fire that makes it superior or inferior to any other way of killing someone.

-Username17

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:51 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: A burst of magical fire is just a magical attack. Whether it's better, worse, or the same as a physical attack is entirely contingent on its parameters. There is nothing inherent about the concept of magical fire that makes it superior or inferior to any other way of killing someone.

Yeah, that sort of philosophy that magic has to be better than everything else just because its magic has always baffled me.

Conan's sword attacks are death attacks in the book. He stabs someone and they die. Why a finger of death or a scorching ray has to automatically be better than by virtue of being magical just doesn't make any sense.

Whether it's a sword, a crossbow bolt or a fireball, it's designed to kill people.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 8:04 pm

And of course there are some settings where magic is an inferior power source.

For example, did you know that 'magic' exists in Dragonball? It does. But except for Babidi and the senzuu beans magic gets phased out of the series after a certain point because magic is explicitly inferior to exercise in the setting. Of course, Dragonball also tells us that if you do enough push-ups and situps you'll eventually be able to train yourself to fly.

There is also magic in Fist of the North Star. But the real fighters of the setting don't use it because it's fucking slow as hell and not as strong as just jabbing your fingers into soft points in peoples' bodies. Jukei can reprogram peoples' minds with a spell but Kenshiro does this as a throwaway technique. And so on.