Mechanics that disappoint you in every conceivable manner

[Username17]

I was with you until this. The fact that they can beat harder challenges or more challenges of the same hardness or whatever, does not mean that they should face stronger or more numerous challenges. You're basically mixing up "is and ought" to stealth in a demand for a hard level treadmill. Why? Why not just let players who get some asymmetric power actually win a bit harder?

Because the claimed idea was that you balanced the game on no magic items of any kind, and then still provided each and every PC with multiple magic items. At that point, you are not winning slightly harder, you are literally just curb stomping the challenges the book tells you to face.

This is just a bizarre slippery slope argument. A helm of underwater action makes an otherwise difficult underwater encounter easy, but it does not make you curb stomp (literally or figuratively) all possible opposition. A scroll of control winds turns an otherwise difficult encounter with sprites into a cake walk, but it does not make you curb stomp all possible opposition.

In fact, you could have items that made encounters easy, and you could have a very large number of them, and you could still find that a considerable number of remaining challenges remained hard. What you're arguing is a strange reverse sorites paradox, and you're not actually making sense.

The reality is that the difficulty is supposed to be set to the point where the players win. That's the difficulty that encounters are supposed to have, because otherwise iterative probability being what it is, the players won't get very fucking far. In fact, the longer the game goes on, the easier individual encounters have to be, because otherwise iterative probability is going to fuck you up. If you have a 2% chance of losing an encounter, and you're supposed to do 13 encounters a level, you have an eighty percent chance of losing sometime before you reach 7th level. If you have only a 1% chance of losing an encounter, you still have a seventy three percent chance of losing before you hit level 11.

So from a simple mathematical standpoint, you fucking need the individual encounters to become less threatening over time. So not only are you fucking wrong about the paradigm of magic items that make specific encounters easy necessarily making all or even most encounters easy - but even if you were right about that, that wouldn't be a bad thing. The game needs to get easier over time, because otherwise longer campaigns can't fucking exist.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Because the claimed idea was that you balanced the game on no magic items of any kind, and then still provided each and every PC with multiple magic items. At that point, you are not winning slightly harder, you are literally just curb stomping the challenges the book tells you to face.

This is just a bizarre slippery slope argument. A helm of underwater action makes an otherwise difficult underwater encounter easy, but it does not make you curb stomp (literally or figuratively) all possible opposition. A scroll of control winds turns an otherwise difficult encounter with sprites into a cake walk, but it does not make you curb stomp all possible opposition.

Yes, if each item literally only helps you against one encounter ever, and the PCs do not intelligently attempt to use the items in a way that bypasses that, then the items are useless pieces of shit except when you curbstomp.

But exactly the second you provide any item that is useful in multiple encounters, that goes out the window, whether that is the Helm of Underwater Action making the entire against the Saungin Campaign too fucking easy, or the use activated item of Control Weather making every outdoor fight ever easier, or whatever.

It is certainly possible to describe a situation in which items are not useless and also do not effect more than one encounter, but in practice good fucking luck, because PCs are not idiots and you don't get to force them into anything.

If literally all items are consumables, then go ahead and design your game around them not having any, but if you ever give items that are useful in a variety of situations, such as a Helm of Underwater Action, or an item of Control Weather, you instantly put it in the PCs hands to use that item over and over. And they will.

The reality is that the difficulty is supposed to be set to the point where the players win. That's the difficulty that encounters are supposed to have, because otherwise iterative probability being what it is, the players won't get very fucking far. In fact, the longer the game goes on, the easier individual encounters have to be, because otherwise iterative probability is going to fuck you up. If you have a 2% chance of losing an encounter, and you're supposed to do 13 encounters a level, you have an eighty percent chance of losing sometime before you reach 7th level. If you have only a 1% chance of losing an encounter, you still have a seventy three percent chance of losing before you hit level 11.

Hey Frank, if you are going to go on your rant about how players need to win, maybe do that to someone who doesn't use "Players must win" as a premise in their argument. Since here you just spent a really long time typing things that justify a premise we both agree on that was already a premise I used in my argument.

So from a simple mathematical standpoint, you fucking need the individual encounters to become less threatening over time. . . . The game needs to get easier over time, because otherwise longer campaigns can't fucking exist.

1) In a completely irrelevant aside, No, you don't need the game to get easier over time, because you can start at the number that produces those long campaigns from the beginning. What you are stating here is the equivalent of saying it is literally impossible to have a loan payment plan which charges interest based on the original principle before payments.

A loan of 100 dollars with a 5% interest payment on 100 dollars across each month could be paid back in 10 payments of 15 dollars. Or you could have a higher interest rate based on current principle which also pays out 150 dollars over 10 monthly payments, where the math is done differently. Both of those produce the result.

Likewise, you can just start with a .75% death chance and keep that going for all 20 levels instead of starting at 2% at level 1 and decaying to .5% at level 20.

2) However, all of that is irrelevant because the point is that you should design your game for what the PCs can actually do. If you design the game to give a 2% fatality rate at all levels with no magic items, and then just hope without any particular design work that giving magic items will decay the death rate to something reasonable without making challenges too easy then you are just a lazy designer using lazy design and it will backfire in your failure to hit the right numbers, and PCs either dying too much or everything being too easy.

[zugschef]

Kaelik, can you explain your actual position, again (or in a tl;dr variant) please?

[Kaelik]

You should balance your game for the expected magic items of your PCs, and not balance the game with no magic items of any kind and then hope against hope that somehow adding magic items you didn't balance for will not create a game that is shit.

You would think that would be an uncontroversial statement.

[Username17]

You should balance your game for the expected magic items of your PCs, and not balance the game with no magic items of any kind and then hope against hope that somehow adding magic items you didn't balance for will not create a game that is shit.

You would think that would be an uncontroversial statement.

And yet, it's not only a controversial statement, it's a retarded statement. You should balance for the minimum amount of magic items, because players hitting above their weight class is not a problem and players underperforming is.

This isn't a game with two sides, where it's important that both sides be equal. It's a game with one MC and three to six players where the players are supposed to fucking win. The players winning harder, whether by a little or a lot is not an issue. The players underperforming considerably ends the fucking game. So obviously you should set the balance point to a conservative guess as to player character ability, not an average.

If you're designing Shadowrun adventures, they should be completeable by the shitty sample characters. And if the min/maxxed characters that lots of people actually play run roughshod over those adventures that is OK! If players invest time and effort into their characters being good at things, their characters should in fact succeed at those things.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

You should balance for the minimum amount of magic items, because players hitting above their weight class is not a problem and players underperforming is.

So you think all encounters ever in the game of D&D should be balanced for the prisonbreak no magic items no spells prepared Wizard?

That is the minimum. Nevermind that it will happen one out of a million times, that is the actual minimum. Nevermind that the average expected magic items that the game specifically tries to give you and states you are basically entitled to is so fucking many leaps and bound above that point that if you balance to it you might as well just not actually ever roll a saving throw or attack roll and just declare you win. Because there exists a 1 in a million circumstance that the PCs might, under extraordinary circumstances, have no magic items.

Because it is better design practice to design the entire game around the concept of no one ever having a magic item and the have 99.999999999% of all encounters be curbstomping wastes of time than to have a sentence somewhere in the book that says "If the PCs have all their magic items taken away, you should probably substantially reduce the difficulty of their challenges."

[deaddmwalking]

It's certainly true that 'balancing' an item that provides increased combat power in a broad range of situations (say a +3 ghost touch flaming burst weapon) against an item that is likely useless in many circumstances (ie, helm of underwater action is difficult if not impossible.

Assuming 'no magic items' can give you a baseline. Modifying that baseline can be easy or hard - guidelines can suggest how to handle it.

Increasing challenges isn't usually hard - but reducing the challenge after it has been declared can easily ruin a game... And so can not reducing a challenge that ends up wiping the floor with the PCs.

[momothefiddler]

Kaelik, your comment on gestalts leads me to believe that you'd accept (though perhaps not like) a system where CR guidelines were based on no equipment and there were rules for adjusting CR based on equipment. Is this true?

[Kaelik]

Kaelik, your comment on gestalts leads me to believe that you'd accept (though perhaps not like) a system where CR guidelines were based on no equipment and there were rules for adjusting CR based on equipment. Is this true?

I'm pretty sure I specifically said I would be fine with that somewhere, but yes, I would.

Whether or not you could write such a system I'm not sure. But since D&D 3e has the best/most complete challenge guidelines I have ever seen, and they are completely lacking in non combat challenges and not so great on the combat...

I'm not sure that adjustable challenge guidelines based on items is any more of a pipe dream than just solid challenge guidelines.