Is game balance the most important part of a system?

>>53339584
Balance regarding what?

>>53339584
The most important part of a system is that the rules support what you want to play. If the rules don't support whatever that is, or nearly so, then it isn't a system you should be using for whatever it is you want to play.

>>53339584
Epicness is.
Let me explain:
>D&D
Balance is shit, but fuck it's so hella fr*cking epic!
>GURPS
Balanced, but not epic at all.

>>53339737
>hello fr*cking
We're going to need to surgically remove this tumor from tg.

>>53339676
That's such a vague statement that it becomes basically a non-statement when examined critically.

>the rules support what you want to play.

On one hand, a person can argue that the rules do not support what they want to play and list a vague definition based around what the system does not do, while on the other hand a person can argue the rules do support the game they wish to play by listing an overlapping but ultimately contrary definition by listing what the game does do.

>>53339877
I don't see how it's a non-statement. The most important part is that it does what you need it to do. If it can't do that, then nothing else matters, because you shouldn't be using it for whatever game it is you're playing. Is that a difficult concept to grasp?

>>53339584
That depends on what you mean by "balance".

If the game is imbalanced to the point where one PC is making another PC superfluous, then the game is imbalanced to the point where there is a serious problem.

>>53339931
But what does it need to do?

It's saying a game's rules need to help you play the game. But what is the game?
Considering the rules are what help define what the game is, it seems to be largely circular interpretation (the game is obviously what the rules intend it to be).

>>53340046
>But what does it need to do?
>But what is the game?
That's where you come in! If you say you want to play a modern detective drama, well, you're certainly not going to look at D&D as the answer. Maybe you'll choose GUMSHOE, or Call of Cthulhu, or any other number of systems that support "modern detective drama."

No.

>>53335804

Depends what the point of the game is.

In a competitive game, balance is probably the most important thing because otherwise it's no items fox only final destination. Here, it's important because the objective of the game is to defeat another player.

In a more cooperative game, balance is important too but in a much different aspect. In a game like D&D, players want to feel like they are making meaningful contributions to the group. Martial characters remain enormously popular despite their relative weakness next to mages because hitting monsters hard and killing them is satisfying and makes you feel like you've contributed. In a game like this, characters don't need to be on the same power level to be balanced; they just need to have meaningfully different strengths. 3.5 had wild imbalance in druids and clerics who were objectively better than fighters at fighting, but arguably less so with wizards, who broke the game on their own fronts but less commonly outdid martials at their own game. The imbalance there came from making the martials completely irrelevant at all, which would make those players feel like they weren't getting to contribute.

This, I think, is why D&D 4e had such strong criticism of its equalized form of balance. Balance was so flattened that what one character could do didn't really deviate enough from anyone else. You didn't really feel like your own character contributed in their own unique way; at least, not as much as in other systems.

As to other game systems, it depends what the source of fun in the game is. WoD usually revolved around getting the better of your fellow players, and different characters had different ways to do that. Plus, it enforced roleplaying restrictions much more than D&D does (there's really no practical roleplaying downside to playing a warlock unless your DM goes out of his way to enforce one, but being, say, Sabbat is a big restriction in VtM.)

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>>53339584

Balance is important in games meant for match play. Otherwise, it's mostly a meme for people terrified they may not "win" at RPGs.

>>53339877
How is that a "non-statement" exactly?
>>53340046
>But what does it need to do?
>what is the game?
Oh, you're a pedant, I gotchu senpai.

Here's the thing, in tabletop RPGs, the rules define the sorts of games the system can handle by default because the rules will (or at least should) always focus upon the elements that are most important to the average campaign under that system.

The general rule of thumb: If you have a mechanic in the game that only works under that game's specific rules, it generally means that the rules were built with that mechanic in mind and not just stapled onto the side because the designers thought that it was cool.

When you have a game that just throws a shitload of rules into a blender and serves you the result without proper testing, you end up with 3.PF, where every mechanic seems to operate on separate rules that barely interact with one another and you're stuck with 300 pages of rules where only like 5% of the pages are worth reading.

>>53339584
short answer: yes, because imbalance makes the game less fun for weaker people

long answer: in moderation, since too little balance leads to the short answer, while perfect balance is basically havign every single character be equal to one another, since balance is impossible as long as any 2 characters have a difference. people can have fun in an imbalanced setting, as long as things can be stacked up so that nobody notices

If we're talking about an RPG system, then no. Balance is important, but the most important thing is that various options are viable.

It's similar to balance, but the specifics are different. Balance is about making sure that the various options in different situations are roughly equal in terms of power, so that no one aspect has an overpowering advantage in a specific situation.

Variety doesn't have to stick to that idea, because it can absolutely allow some things to be broken as all hell in specific situations. Rather, the overall importance of variety is that each player is capable of doing interesting things in the situation they've chosen to focus on.

I guess it can be considered balance as well, but I feel the distinction is important. More conventional idea of balance are intended for competitive environments, while RGPs are ultimately cooperative ones. Trying to make an RPG balanced by those ideals often just leaves it very bland and uninteresting.

>>53340078
What part of D&D bars modern detective drama? There was even a 2e module with the players travelling into an alternate dimension/time (which curiously resembled 1980's Wisconsin) and having to figure out their way back while relying on modern analogs of their characters.

If the constraint you are trying to establish is genre, that doesn't really work when genre tend to largely just be a skin on the mechanics.

We can always say that D&D (or any other game) does what we needed it to do if we remain flexible, and simultaneously can say no game does what we need it to do if we try to formulate boundaries that exist only superficially.

>>53339584
only for gamists

>>53339737
t. ignoramus

>>53339877
Like it or not, a system affects what type of setting can be effectively played; mechanics do play a role in determining flavor. An extremely simplified example: you can't play a setting with magic in it in a system that does not include magic.

Game balance is less necessary, but a "Points" balance is necessary.

Like a 40K Terminator is tougher than a vanilla guardsman. Sure.

If model count was the balancing factor, then yeah, this'd be bullshit.
Instead, there's a point value to each, so there's at least some semblance of balance in the long run.

I think that's the problem with a lot of fantasy games. Sure, there are those in the camp that hated 4e for "Making everything into casters". Myself, I would have prefered it if levels reflected the strength of each characters' abilities as a similar points system.

So sure, mages can get super powerful, but why isn't there a mechanic built into the game that makes certain classes quicker to level up then others in order to keep things fair, or some sort of "Effectiveness" calculation so that at the very least, GMs have a hard and fast guideline as to how tough they should make enounters compared to the players. If a fighter and a wizard are both level X, but the fighter is only half as useful as the wizard, there should be something quantifying how useful each are.

>>53340234
This

My group recently started Deadlands Classic. In Character Generation you pull 12 cards from a standard playing card deck to generate your attributes and can increase those attributes after Chargen with exp. Each player was given 3 pulls to make a character. Out of curiousity I took the highest pull and my middle pull and then calculated how much exp the lower characters would need to catch up. From my Middle pull to the High pull was about 325 exp or about 100 sessions worth of exp going at the suggested rate of 2-4 exp. That is a huge difference in character value. With the success rate the higher character would enjoy it would be like playing a first level character in a party of 8-10th level characters. The GM would have have to slow pitch to the weakest character because if he challenged the stronger the weaker would be a skidmark.

>>53339737
What makes D&D "epic" though? It sounds more about a matter of campaign than system.

>>53339584
PVE balance is a meme; you shouldn't always be in situations where the enemy is equal to you in a fight because it makes the entire campaign feel like less of an adventure and more of a high stakes carnival ride.

PVP balance on the other hand is important, but only in the sense that every player option should be able to contribute at least once per session, just so you don't end up in situations where one group of players is carrying the team while everyone else is struggling to remain viable.

>>53339584
Balance is less important than designing an experience, but I'm not so arrogant in believing that I have crafted such a wondrous system that I can ignore balance.

>>53339584

I think you're asking the wrong question anon.

I think the question should be "is reliance on a strict rules system the best way to create a feeling of game balance?"

The cardinal sin of judging a game system is to assume that the rules in a book can be responsible for balancing a game, when any decently made TTRPG can feel balanced in the hands of a good Game Master.

If you as a GM create tailored scenarios which showcase the skills of certain party members, and are conscientious in making sure everyone is faced with opportunities and adversaries which challenge them, slightly less damage per round or non-optimized multiclassed characters can still enjoy the game because it was specifically written for them to flourish in it.

If I had to answer the question you posed OP, I'd say that statistical balance is mathematical and it helps, but game balance flows from the people playing it.

>>53340295
more importantly, hitpoint bloat leads to healing spell/potion proliferation, one of the most obvious ways of how mechanics can affect setting

>>53340175
4e is the best game WotC has put out, but it's not an RPG.

>>53340535
that is NOT the question. the question is how hard will a game system make it for a GM. because, you see, with every houserule the GM introduces, he expends political capital and when he runs out, the players might start to balk at his constant houseruling and shit a la
>fuck you, GM, I wanna play D&D/Star Wars/Warhammer and not your stupid homebrew

No. Balance is not the most important part.

Fun is the most important part. Is the game fun? If yes, nothing else matters. If it isn't, no amount of balance will save it.

>>53339584
The most important part of a system is that it inspires the GM.

>>53339737
>hella
>fr*cking
>epic
Aren't you supposed to be busy writing Life Is Strange 2: Hellapocalypse?

>>53340672
You seem to live in a world where you play games where the players do not trust the GM and try to work against him rather than with him.

I would hate to live in such a world.

>>53340652
But you play a role in a game so by fucking definition it is a fucking RPG, you mongoloid.

>>53340780
By that definition, games like Mario, CoD, MtG, Resident Evil, Candyland, and so on and so forth are RPGs.

>>53340777
Why should the players trust the GM when he keeps adding a bunch of house rules to a game that either do nothing or make shit worse?

I mean, even the most tempered of friendships can become strained when every week, it feels as though the rules keep changing for arbitrary reasons.

>>53339584
Making all things equivalent is death to the game. examples are Shadowrun which effectively has only 2 classes which both rely on the same attribute (electronic or magic), and 4e which effectively only has 1 class as everyone does just about the same thing only with comical flavor names for the effects.

>>53340829
You're acting under the assumption that houserules are bad, games are delivered perfect and tailor fit, and that any issues with consistancy can't be solved with polite discussion.

Your world must be Hell.

>>53340645
>hitpoint bloat

Oh, this is your buzzword way of saying Low Lethality.

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>>53339737
>Balance is shit, but fuck it's so hella fr*cking epic!
Until you play a monk, and/or that other guy plays a wizard. It was better in 4e and 5e, but in 3.5e you have some classes that make almost everyone else in the party redundant, and other classes that aren't even good at the one thing they're supposed to be good at. Wizard and Truenamer occupy the two extremes in that spectrum.

>>53340877
>You're acting under the assumption that houserules are bad,
Most houserules are made by amateur game devs who think that they know better than the designers without actually knowing anything about the way the rules work. It's rare to find house rules that are actually well made and add something to the game without fucking up some element
>games are delivered perfect
I wouldn't go that far but generally, unless the game is outright broken, every element within its rules are designed with whatever flaws in its design already taken into account.
>and tailor fit,
Not on the their own, but taken as a group, you can find a system that can satisfy whatever needs your campaign requires if you're willing to do some digging.
>and that any issues with consistancy can't be solved with polite discussion.
The issues with consistency are caused by the GM adding house rules that cause inconsistencies to occur.
It's very rare to find house rules that are actually well made and

>>53341061
Not him but I will never understand the people who deny HP bloat being a thing. Any fool with basic skill in math can see that damage doesn't scale well with the amount of HP that a PC can potentially have.

FFS, with a high enough CON modifier and max rolls, you can hit 100+ HP by level 6-12 with every PC, even a wizard who only gets +1d4 HP each level.

>>53341084
It's good that there's some easy fixes for those. The problem with big systems is that a lot of people working on them end up creating some inconsistencies, but it's hardly much of a hiccup anymore thanks to all the resources available on the internet.

Same thing with GURPS, in that it can get a bit messy thanks to its size and some rather large inconsistencies even with similar subsystems (GURPS in particular has a weakness with magic, and I spent much too long trying to cobble something out of the base Magic book until someone guided me through Thaumatology). Thank god for the GURPS general.

>>53341155
>Any fool with basic skill in math can see that damage doesn't scale well with the amount of HP that a PC can potentially have.

You must be a special kind of fool to think that this doesn't simply translate to PCs being able to go through more battles before needing to recuperate.

>FFS, with a high enough CON modifier and max rolls, you can hit 100+ HP by level 6-12 with every PC, even a wizard who only gets +1d4 HP each level.

Low lethality really doesn't mean anything to you, does it? It means that the characters are not expected to die easily.

But, you're starting to sound a bit silly, so I'll just leave it at you liking high lethality, and trying to coin buzzwords to designate something you dislike.

>>53341256
Person who likes 4e here. The HP bloat issue is that monsters are the same, at least if you use the MM1 maths. It makes combat into a boring slog where everyone can tank a billion hits before they finally go down.

>>53340829
>he keeps adding a bunch of house rules to a game that either do nothing or make shit worse?
it's not like they don't do nothing, it keeps the players from exploiting the loopholes of the system, thus curbing their ego powertrips. that can set players off if it happens too often.

>>53341445
That's a specific issue that has a simple resolution, and I don't think he's talking about that because 4e has mechanics to reduce healing spell/potion reliance, the most obvious being healing surges.

>>53341256
Here's the thing, if PC's can go through a shitload of combat encounters without rest aren't expected to die, then what's the fucking point of combat then?

>>53341061
no, low lethality can also be had by making hitting hard, for example. or low damage weapons. potion belts are needed when you have lots of hitpoints and repeteadly take lots of damage, so that you have to refresh.

>>53341457
>it keeps the players from exploiting the loopholes of the system, thus curbing their ego powertrips.
The reality of the situation is that the people who found ways to exploit the rules will also find ways to exploit house rules, because most people aren't professional game designers and likely only decided to patch up what was readily apparent at the time without considering the repercussions of how this would affect the game as a whole.

The opposite is also true, where a house rule is made purely to spite a supposed loop hole when in reality the rules are working as intended, which can lead to several elements in the game breaking as a result.

>>53341505
If by "shitload" you mean 3-5, I think that's a gross misuse of that word.

In general, low-lethality is for groups that are invested in their characters and the story revolving around them. But, it's also for groups that enjoy long-term strategy over short-term tactics, and enjoy gauging how much they need to spend and invest in each battle without having to simply fully commit everything to each one.

>>53340780
Stop replying to obvious trolls.

>>53341576
>no, low lethality can also be had by making hitting hard
Not really. That's a statistical fallacy that leads to the PCs simply being at the mercy of bad luck. Any individual PC is expected to suffer more attacks than any enemy, putting any favor towards high chance (like in the case of making critical hits more damaging) much more deadly than what may initially be assumed.

>for example. or low damage weapons.
That's really just another way of saying High HP.

>>53339584
You can argue about HOW important balance is, but I fail to see how anyone could conclude that it's the MOST important thing.

>>53341604
>If by "shitload" you mean 3-5, I think that's a gross misuse of that word.
If by "3-5," you mean per session then I got news for you, that is a shitload of combat.
>In general, low-lethality is for groups that are invested in their characters and the story revolving around them.
Why play them if you don't want to risk them dying though?

>>53339584
Yes and no. Too much imbalance can wreck the fun of a game, but once different characters are more-or-less balanced (when any random character archetype can both contribute meaningfully and often in ways that don't feel contrived, and won't completely overshadow other character archetypes), then from that point it pays diminishing returns. Pretty-well-balanced is much better than unbalanced, but perfectly-balanced is just a little better than pretty-well-balanced.

Balance is irrelevant. A GM should be able to create situations in which all party members have a role. And if one person excels at everything then the gm needs to have a talk with that player and/or alter the system to fit the game's needs.

I know people will say this us a cop out which doesn't excuse a bad system. But the way I see it, blaming the system is a cop out which doesn't excuse a bad gm.

There are few systems out there which can't be made enjoyable at the hands of a good gm.

>>53342025
>A GM should be able to create situations in which all party members have a role. And if one person excels at everything then the gm needs to have a talk with that player and/or alter the system to fit the game's needs.

And a system should make the GM's job easier, not harder. Unless you're arguing that no-one should ever play a system other than OD&D.

>>53342025
t. Pathfucker

>>53342066
Why don't you just play video games if you lack the willingness to alter a game's rules to suit your needs?

>>53342117
If you want to "alter" Pathfinder to be balanced, you need to start by burning down the rulebook.

>>53342117
Because there are other systems which may not require nearly as much "altering"

>>53342117
I want the changes I make to a game to be changes that make it better suited to some specific campaign, in terms of the challenges to overcome or the mood to be set. I don't want to make changes just to get the game to function as advertised.

If you buy a car, then maybe you want to modify it to make it run faster or more efficiently or whatever else you want the car to do. If you have to take it apart and put it back together just so it stops making that clanging noise and shutting down every couple of days, it's a bad car. You're neither a bad mechanic nor a bad driver; it's just a bad car. The time you spent getting it to work is time you could have spent making it really great.

>>53341763
>3-5
>per session
>a shitload

Really? My group does about 10+ encounters a session pretty routinely.

>>53342139
That's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make though.

If system A has mechanics you and your group enjoy but has some OP builds or character options, while system B is balanced but you find it boring, are you seriously telling me you will choose B over A just so you don't have to change anything?

>>53342251
If you phrase it so everyone in the group likes the unbalanced system and doesn't like the balanced one, no

>>53342211
Well then I guess we just have an irreconcilable difference of opinion since I bought a jeep wrangler which is notorious for breaking down because I liked the car so much. I don't mind getting under the hood now and then not to mention the modifications I've spent money on. It's more enjoyable to me then a reliable land cruiser would have been.

>>53342251
>If system A has mechanics you and your group enjoy but has some OP builds or character options, while system B is balanced but you find it boring, are you seriously telling me you will choose B over A just so you don't have to change anything?
Yes, because if balance is that important to the game I'm trying to run, time that I don't have to spend combing through OP builds on charops is time that I could be spending working on the campaign as a whole.

>>53342251
That's a false dilemma. Believe it or not, regardless of what you want to play, there's almost always more than 2 games for it.

>>53342250
What system and what campaign?

>>53342061

This. A good DM can handle a bad system, but a ok or bad DM will really suffer. The system as a base should be fun. Mechanics are fun. Balance is important to some degree, obviously the DM has to handle some things but the system should do its best to make his or her job easier.

>>53339584
Ha. No. Fun is.

Game balance is a vesicle for maintaining things to be fun. If balance is getting in the way of fun, it should be tossed out.

>>53339584
Most important part? No, but it is generally a prerequisite to a system being good. All choices in character creation should matter roughly equally, all other things equal. Balance between the players and GMs should also be important, but that's less of a rules thing and more of a courtesy thing.

Obviously a pyromancer won't be very useful in an underwater campaign, and a fish man won't do very well in a desert campaign, but that's not the point.

>>53342371
>vesicle
vehicle, ugh.

>>53342139
>may

That's a pretty harsh "may", especially when the number of garbage games out there is truly impressive. If your group has found one they like, it's really much easier to reskin that to suit your needs than to go through the web of lies and false advertisements conjured here and elsewhere in hopes of netting your group.

After sampling some fifty games, I've grown to recommend people to avoid specialist systems, generic systems, and other silly gap-filling ideas and to just grab some of the titles that are just flat out "good". It's much easier to tweak a good system than it is to pray there's another good system out there that suits your needs and that you'll be able to find it and convince your group to play it.

>>53339584
If your aim is to balance things out, you are shit, your game is shit and your entire bloodline is shit

>>53342343
5e, currently level 9, lots of politics and mystery but the big focus is the ongoing war against the dwarves.

>>53342421

...and you do 10+ combat encounters per session?

>>53339584
This is a trick question: Yes and no, depending on what exactly you mean by balance.
Should all options be functionally identical? Not in most games, no.
Should all options have consideration placed on niche and role, so that every type of character has palpable and meaningful strengths and weaknesses? So each, say, class' worth and engagement is in balance? Yes.

Think of it like this:
Chess is balanced because both sides have identical pieces in an identical starting configuration. Its gameplay is also enriched through the unique strengths and weaknesses of individual pieces.
Ideally in an RPG the balance of abilities across the spectrum of character options should be like the differences between pieces rather than the difference between white and black sides of the board.

>>53342390
Different strokes for different folks, but you couldn't pay me to say, run a superhero game in 5e. I've never been in a group where people wouldn't be able to pick up the basics of a system well enough after a session or two

>>53339584
The most important thing of a game is the people you play with

>>53339584
A system needs to do three things (in decreasing priority):
- Create a common understanding of how the world works
- Provide the GM predictable levers to pull to affect the experience
- Generate interesting situations on its own

Balance is important to all three points, but mostly the second. If the GM wants to, say, provide a difficult but beatable combat challenge for four third-level characters, they should be able to do that by the book as much as possible. I mean, perhaps the third-level plant monster is not the right choice to challenge the party with a Fire Wizard, but we shouldn't need to throw out the entire collection of third-level monsters if someone's playing as a Vorpal Knight or Fail Rogue.

You can also make it work if you say "this class is straight up worse than the others, here's how to compensate for it" in the rules. But that's pretty rare, and having someone on the forums say "of course wizards are better than fighters, duh!" is not a valid substitute for rules that actually help you. (Ars Magicka actually does have characters that intentionally suck. It's an interesting read.)

>>53342390
>That's a pretty harsh "may", especially when the number of garbage games out there is truly impressive.
In a world where you can easily download .pdf's of every tabletop RPG in existence for free, this doesn't really matter as much as it did when everyone had to buy physical copies of the rulebooks.
>If your group has found one they like, it's really much easier to reskin that to suit your needs than to go through the web of lies and false advertisements conjured here and elsewhere in hopes of netting your group.
It really isn't, unless you're one of those amateur game devs who thinks that you can slap a few rules onto a system and call it a day.

>>53340356
>why isn't there a mechanic built into the game that makes certain classes quicker to level up then others in order to keep things fair
Older editions of D&D did this. The magic-user was the most powerful class so it required a lot more experience to level than a thief.

>>53342421
>lots of politics and mystery
>10+ combat encounters per session
Those numbers don't add up senpai.

>>53342520
>The magic-user was the most powerful class
It was often much safer to be the fighter and not deal with the turboshit d4 hp

>>53342569

Clearly they're talking about 'encounters' aka any dice rolling situation, puzzle, etc. But the thing they were replying to was very clearly talking about combat and said so. A 3 round 15 minute quick tussle isn't what most people consider combat. The poignant sting of a glass of wine thrown into a man's face at a dance is not combat either.

>>53342520
>The magic-user was the most powerful class
This is just a lie. There was only a handful of good spells and they took forever to fire off.

>>53342443
Yes? My group is three veteran players, if you think that's worth mentioning.

>>53342569
Really? I guess your math must trump my reality. I'll go tell my group some guy on the internet told me that what we're doing is impossible so that we need to stop.

>>53342798
Are you literally fighting crippled babies with parkinson's disease or something? Because none of those numbers add up one bit.

Next time you shitpost, at least try to make it believable.

>>53342750
Battles typically last 5-10 rounds, roughly 20-40 minutes each. That's roughly 4 or so hours of combat to hit 10 battles, with a few 1-3 round battles mixed in alongside an occasional hour-long battle. Since we play 6-8 hour long sessions, the idea of 3-5 battles being a lot seems a little silly.

Do you guys take ten minutes just to get through one round of combat or something? Or do you only play for 3 hours?

>>53342840
Okie dokie. I'll try to keep reality from bursting your dream bubbles, since it seems you really depend on your dream bubbles as the foundation of all of your arguments.

>>53339737
You overplayed your hand, you fucking shitlord.

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>>53343015

>>53342968
>Do you guys take ten minutes just to get through one round of combat or something? Or do you only play for 3 hours?

He's probably a brain damaged 4rry and spends the entire session on one encounter.

>>53339584
>Is game balance the most important part of a system?
OP, let me put it this way:

If I am paying you for the mechanics you wrote, then yes, they must be balanced.

Otherwise I may as well just homebrew.

An analogy: if I am paying you to install a door, it must be hung with the right balance so it works every time I use it. If you don't, I won't pay.

>>53342968
>>53343046
You still haven't exactly explained what it is you're fighting though. I mean, there's a difference between fighting a bunch of goblins and fighting an adult dragon for example.

>>53343045
Excuse me while I get the Nobel prize for sending in your post as an isolated anf purified form of the element of Irony.

>>53343089
Both take 5 hours in 4e, so doesn't make a difference.

>>53343098
>>53343098
Answer the question sweetie.

What exactly are you fighting 10+ times in one session on average?

>>53343046
If a fight takes 20 minutes to solve then imho it wasn't worth playing out to begin with. I play PF and I want to weigh out my tactical options, check my spells, etc. It's about enjoying solving a puzzle instead of a diversion you rush thorough. Can you *really* claim you enjoyed a 20 minute fight? I don't think so.

>>53343089
Battles that last 1-3 rounds? Goblins.
Battles that last an hour? Dragon.
In between? Stuff that's in between.

But, it's mostly evil dwarves and automatons.

>>53343130
5e feels a lot faster than PF. It's still tactically rich, but we worry a lot less about position and more about action economy, which has much sharper limits than PF.

/tg/ - Where the number of responses a post generates is inversely proportionate to how insightful it is.

>>53343199
Can't you please be more specific? Because saying "evil dwarves and automatons" doesn't really say a whole lot in terms of how deadly of a threat we're talking here.

Also, how does a dragon last an hour when battles typically last 5-10 rounds, roughly 20-40 minutes each and how do you fit in such large scale encounters in yet still have enough time to blow through 10+ encounters?

>>53343321
I'm sorry, but you've convinced me I'm dealing with a very special class of autist. You seem to really just be invested in tiring people out with increasingly inane questions.

Consider yourself ignored from this poiny forward.

>>53343264

What a true statement. Have a (You), frienderino.

>>53343424
You could've just wrote "I'm full of shit, leave me alone" and saved yourself a few minutes of typing.

>>53343953
Could you just shut up already? Whether or not this one guy is counting "you kill three goblins" as a combat is way less interesting than the discussion topic.

>>53343982
Just ignore him. He's been trolling for attention from the start.

>>53342512
I'd say the last two overlap considerably, but you're right thay the first is probably the most important part of a game.

>>53341084
>It was better in 4e and 5e, but in 3.5e
Your timeline is backwards, mate

>>53341679
>Not really.
Of course, it can, you faggot. Another example is hero points, a time-proven mehanic for decreasing lehtality in games. I am sorry that you're such a cocksucker that you can't look beyond D&D. either that or you're a moron who doesn't understand RPG mechanics.

>That's really just another way of saying High HP.
yep, an imbecile who is spouting bullshit. a game like harnmaster doesn't have HP. here weapons inflict injuries (negative modifiers to all skill rolls plus effects like KO or death). by reducing their impact (damage equivalent), you're reducing their lethality.

of course, if all you know is hitpoints, you're bound to fallaciously equate the two.


damn, i wonder what it feels like to be a pleb gamer like you. wew, laddie.

>>53344111
While I said the first is the most important, I think it's also the least interesting. It's an important thing that should be pretty easy to accomplish. A system that fails to create shared expectations falls apart entirely.

Giving the GM predictable levers is pretty easy in a simple system. Risus has like two pages of rules but you know an enemy with a five-dice skill is a serious threat. On the other hand Risus gives almost nothing back to the players; just a string of successes and failures, never generating situations on its own.

Having the system generate interesting situations takes more rules, and makes it harder to give the GM good tools to control the experience since there can be chain reactions. The wizard who can summon conveyor belts and his two archer buddies make an interesting mechanical situation (assuming there are mechanics for these things), but they're also much more dangerous than three conveyor wizards or three archers.

>>53344254
Hero points are in D&D. You also seemed to avoid the point about relying on random chance more to mitigate damage is not in favor of the player's survival.

And games that inflict penalties rather than superficial HP damage are considerably more lethal, since it tends to end up as a game of rocket tag where the first hit (or first few hits) end up being decisive. That's why they've never been very popular, since high lethality games in general are not as popular.

Please. Don't act the fool.

>>53343264
If you ask me the best way to check if a thread's any good is to look at the ratio of posts to unique posters. Let's say it's 20 IPs in a thread with 150 posts. That typically means the thread's going to be something like 10 people lobbing all sorts of shit at each other over a few hours and the few dozen attempts at discussion get buried in bitter shitposting.

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>>53344402
>since high lethality games in general are not as popular.
Retard detected.

>>53341256
>coin buzzwords
Because I totally can't find results talking about HP bloat in 2010, no, it's totally that guy making up a term nobody has used before. Downie pls go.

>>53345913
You'd do well to look at a few statistics.
Compared to 5e, PF, 3.5, and 4e, older editions of D&D are hardly worth mentioning when the discussion is about popularity or player poulation. In fact, outside of 5e and 3.PF, it's very hard to call any other games "popular" simply because the percentage of players that play them is so low that the margin of error exceeds their value.

In short, it's really no exaggeration to say that high lethality games are not as popular as low lethality games.

>>53346067
Yes, because selling 3M box sets means nothing when talking about a game's popularity. Are you even listening to yourself?

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>>53346147
Perhaps this may help?

>>53341155
You need perfect rolls and a +5 mod on a wizard

>>53346067
>3.5
>PF
>low lethality

>>53346229
Go away mister Oliver.

>>53346229
It's not helping at all. You're making statements about how popular a concept is based on bullshit when one of the most popular RPGs of all time was lethal as fuck. Even if you ignored Basic, 3.PF isn't low lethality, 4E's foray into low lethality bullshit padfests led to everyone who played it bitching until WotC fixed the problem, and 5E isn't low lethality all of the time. More likely, lethality has little to do with popularity.

>>53344402
>Hero points are in D&D.
D&D is truly cutting, bleeding edge. so? obviously it is wrong to equate hitpoint bloat with low lethality as there are various means of bestowing low lethality.

>relying on random chance
that is pure statistics. in one system a player can die because an NPC rolled a 1 on a d100, in other because an NPC rolled 4 times max damage in a row

>popularity
who cares. also SW Saga had a death spiral but it wasnt a lethal game at all. (had also HP bloat)

>Please. Don't act the fool.
You're dodging the point. That equating low lethality with HP bloat has been wrong.

>>53346497
High lethality has certainly not harmed games like CoC or Dark Heresy.

>>53340239
Yes, we can always say a bike with square wheels is just as good as a car if we remain flexible, and simultaneously can say no game does what we need it to do if we try to formulate boundaries that exist only superficially.

>>53346497
If we're talking about popularity, and you tell me about something that was popular decades ago and isn't popular anymore, all I can do is shake my head and wonder why I'm even bothering to try to talk to you.

>>53346662
If high lethality games were inherently less popular than low lethality games, Basic would have never been popular in the first place.

>>53346739
Basic had no real competition, which isn't the case today.
But, there was a consistent trend of lower and lower lethality up until 4e pushed the envelope a step too far.

And, regardless of how much you want to discuss the nature of whether high lethality games are "inherently" less popular, you certainly can't refute that today, games designated as low lethality are more popular than ones considered high lethality.

>>53340234
No, imbalance makes things more fun for weaker players because they can use the cheap and unfair stuff so they stand a chance at all.

>>53346606
The only actual argument against investigative games in D&D is "magic", and that argument doesn't carry as much weight as people say until the characters are fairly fair along in the game, and requires the DM to allow sketchy magic use with no repercussions.
One or the other simply makes it less dramatic, but I can think of a host of other games with considerable supernatural abilities that still have mysteries in them by rote, and they are not lesser for it.

>>53346241
It's generally easier to roll higher than average on a d4 than on a d12 and the point was to illustrate how easy it is to gain 100HP during the relatively early levels of the game.

I mean, the class with the lowest potential health can have 100HP through enough investment in CON around level 12 or so, meanwhile classes like Fighters and Barbarians can potentially have double that by level 12 under similar conditions.

Then to compound the issue, weapon damage is still more or less scaled to the lower HP totals you'd see in older editions of D&D, where having 100HP was the apex for what a class could reach, and only if they were a warrior class such as Fighter, Barbarian, or Paladin.

>>53346067
Shadow Run is arguably around D&D's popularity and it's lethal as fuck if you don't properly prepare for shit.

>>53346497
>4e
>low lethality

Am I being baited?

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>>53347021
>Shadow Run is arguably around D&D's popularity

>>53347045
People who only know the first run of creatures with too much hp and too little damage.

>>53347072
That would explain it. I've had at least twice as many PC deaths in 4e than any other Wizards made D&D

>>53347062
It has five editions, half a dozen video game adaptations, published stories, etc. and is consistently in the top 8 games being played on roll20.

It might not have the marketing push that D&D has but you can't say that it isn't in the same ballpark when you consider that it's been a thing for almost thirty years.

>>53347094
Ditto.
The group's first dungeon crawl, there was 1 survivor out of 6.
For another group, 3 out of 6.
Muthafuckers bedda know.

>>53347045
When it came out. Again, everyone bitched until WotC relented and fixed the problem. Petty's pet theory doesn't hold water because if what he said was true, nobody would have bitched.

>>53339584
The DMs screen is there for a reason. Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

>>53347102

Everyone who has played shadowrun has played dnd first.

You can ask random people on the street if they know what dnd is or if they have ever played it and you will find a surprising number of people who say yes to one or both.

Ask randoms if they have heard of or played shadow run, and you probably go all day until you find someone.

If you look at shadow run's popularity by reference to other non dnd table top games, sure its a big game, but compared to dnd its minuscule.

>>53347102
Even being in the top 8 isn't really being in the same ballpark.

The disparity between D&D and every other roleplaying game is incredible. Even just talking about 5e, the wall between it and any single non-D&D game is around 45% of the player base. In a few months, it is on track to very likely having more players than all other games COMBINED.

And that's including Pathfinder and 3.5, the next two big games, which are still far and away more popular than any game, with combined numbers roughly equaling all the remaining non-5e players.

And, we haven't even included 4e or older D&Ds yet.

Shadowrun is more popular than most RPGs, but comparing it to D&D's popularity is a bit of a faulty analogy.

>>53347045
>>53347072
>>53347094
>>53347121

Compared to games considered "High Lethality?"

4e has a number of safety measures to keep players alive, like the triple death saving throw, high HP, and every character having innate healing. While monsters do dish out truckloads of damage, there's very few instant death effects, and many tactical options for rapid healing, escape, and defense.

If you are having a lot of players dying, it may be because you're pushing the game towards being more lethal. but compared to games where a single failed roll or even just an arbitrary decision can kill a PC instantly (or at the far end with games designed to kill all the PCs with no chance of survival), it's actually rather low on the spectrum.

>>53347191
>>53347258
Isn't that like saying "well, if you go around asking random people on the streets, they'll be more likely to know about Justin Bieber than something like The Beetles."

It's like, no shit the thing that gets referenced the most in pop culture is going to be more recognizable, it doesn't mean that they both don't have a strong following.

>>53347360
Anon, no one said the game is high lethality, we are disputing the idea it is low.
The safety measures you bring up are in absence of others: characters have innate healing, but it is not free, not very strong and runs out startlingly quick. High hp means little when you already brought up that foes deal a proportionate amount of damage equal to 1/5 to 1/3 of your hp per hit, and the death saves are not as helpful as you think because they stack with each other over the day, and I've watched more people bleed out on the floor (or eat an aoe and die) than survive.
A game like BESM is low lethality, and it is so on purpose.

>>53347469
BESM bounces between low and high lethality due to shitty balance. Some autofire spammer can kill guys way above their supposed power level in one shot.

>>53347419
Shadowrun is plenty popular. It's a fun system, and you're right, it does have a strong following.

It's just that comparing it to D&D's popularity is understating just how popular D&D is. That's not saying that D&D is better or anything like that, simply that it has dramatically more players.

>>53340046
>But what does it need to do?

That depends entirely and completely on the particular group of 4-5 people playing it.

That's why people pedding one-size-fits-all solutions are morons.

>>53347469
In the realm of dungeon exploration and fantasy combat, it's pretty low lethality.

Compared to a Slice of Life game, it's certainly more lethal, but within its own genre it really leans more towards "Punish players who deserve it" rather than "Punish players who are unlucky" or "Punish players for having the arrogance to exist."

4e even advises the DM not to have monsters attack fallen characters, and is built with a fair amount of options (such as low level teleportation and similar utility powers) to ensure that if players act with caution and are able to pace themselves, survival is expected, even if victory isn't.

It's perhaps not as low lethality as what 5e is (which is basically a bounce castle), but it's definitely got more pads on the plastic playground than the bare steel monkey bars you'll find elsewhere.

>>53342840

Has the session length been established? Cause 10 encounters in ~5 hours is pretty reasonable, especially since there's a fucking war going on...

>>53343264

So the more we respond to this, tg will become a better, more insightful place?

Get the fuck in here, boys!

>>53347699
I still have to wonder what the fuck was going through their heads with that.

>Man, everyone complained about 4E and called it padded sumo at first...
>Let's do it again!

>>53347802
The way I understand it is that the players who were attracted to 4e are very different from targeted for 5e. Wizards decided to put less focus on aiming for the 4e crowd and rather on the larger gaming population.

4e is best known for its tactical combat, and if the threat of death is kept at bay too long, combat can quickly get boring and repetitive. Also, anyone and everyone that played early 4e was going to complain about the absurdly high HP, even the people who prefer bounce castles, but the key point of their complaints was that the ENEMY hit points were too high.

5e is built with PCs being very durable, but monsters being rather fragile, and this suits a "heroic" style of play, though I guess a more blunt way of saying it is "ego-stroking" or even "casual". Tactical combat is less important to the 5e player than the 4e player, monsters are more for killing than for fighting, and PCs are expected to survive unless something truly tragic happens. Frankly, it seems to work for what it is.

>>53347987
>and rather on the larger gaming population.
Well then what the fuck were they doing with HP? Other games don't work like that.

>>53348070
Other GAMES don't. But, most PLAYERS are more familiar with and prefer HP than just about any other singular damage system. It's even a the basic damage system of most video games as well.

>>53348124
That's not what I meant by that.

If they were looking for the larger gaming population, why were they using a model for HP vs damage that no other game but 4E had?

>>53348158
Not him, but assuming you mean healing surges, they were mostly introduced as a way to LIMIT healing. Sure they healed you 1/4th your HP and you could fully heal out of combat, barring certain circumstances preventing it, but combat encounters were also built on the assumption that you're going into all of them at full health, so monsters tend to hit pretty hard as well, and at least one person bouncing from low HP to 0 to low hp to 0 isn't an unusual occurrence in 4e combat.

Plus once you were out of healing surges, you were shit out of luck if there's still combat going on and you didn't have a Cleric handy(since most surgeless healing was with the Cleric), and there tended to be very few ways to reliably regain surges.

>>53348324
5E, not 4E.

>>53348401
Fair enough. Hard to keep track of what's what, and 4e was the only edition I saw in that reply.

>>53339584
An imbalanced game can still be very fun. It depends on the form and degree of imbalance.

If it's 3.PF-level imbalanced where half of the character classes don't even work and a quarter make the rest entirely superfluous, that's not fun unless everyone works around it. And then you might as well play a different system.

In something closer to DH1e-level imbalance? At least everyone has a role, and it can be a blast.

>>53348158
4e was pretty popular in its own right, and had a number of good elements that could be adapted.

The biggest take-away from 4e is the far superior compartmentalized version of HP that healing surges had to offer. It's the essential formula that can be found in action games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter, where the health bar is relatively small enough to make the battles exciting (with sometimes losing more than half the bar from a single attack), but the reserve healing available (in the form of potions) providing considerable forgiveness and longevity. The major issue with 4e's damage system was simply that the math hadn't been ironed out properly.

But, 5e took many lessons about math from later 4e's book, as well as introducing further changes, with healing not being reliant or limited by surges, and also with a very different expectation of how often you had a chance to heal. in 4e, you had a decent chance of healing after each battle, while 5e requires a more considerable commitment. That required the math to be far more player friendly so that they wouldn't need to heal after roughly every battle.

In the end, it seems to work. The math is far from perfect and favors the players considerably, but if the goal of the game is to make the players happy, giving them an advantage against their foes doesn't seem to detract from that goal.

>>53347987
>5e is built with PCs being very durable,
That's a flat lie. Unless they're a barbarian.

>>53347987
>but monsters being rather fragile,
Definitely not the impression I got from playing it. It was the other way around - monsters gibbed players left and right and soaked more damage than they had any right to.

>>53349307
Reading its DMG, it seems like the expected length of a combat in 5e is 3 rounds. Monsters have to hit HARD.

But PCs can put out an assload too.

>>53349836
That's really fucked up when you get dropped in like 2 hits and sometimes not even that.

>>53351416
PCs do get a lot of ways around that (Shield, uncanny dodge, easy positioning) and I don't think monsters are supposed to do quite that much. About 2 rounds to down someone, if I remember.

Unless you're a barbarian, in which case you never die.

>>53346852
since you can't quantify the significance of the brand for D&D's success, your point is moot

>>53347191
damn, D&D might be an okay game but D&D players are truly the scum of this hobby niche

>>53342520
>More powerful
Not necessarily, it's just people didn't follow certain rules

Your most powerful spells were meant to require rare and expensive materials, you had to take a long ass time to cast them and any hit on you broke the concentration causing it to fail. Your 1d4 hp and lack of actions to do if you had no spell slots meant that you had to ration those spell uses for when they mattered the most

Meanwhile your fighter would walk in with his 8 attacks per round and could be not only a good party member, but an essential one

But people didn't want components so they were dropped
People didn't want to roll for hp and casters were too squishy level 1 so their hit die got upped and people didn't roll for health
And so on

Overtime the big flaws casters had eventually went away because "it's not fun" and having a complex class was too hard

>>53339737
>D&D
>Balance is shit

You know, 4e used to be a thing, and it actually was the best thing to happen to D&D ever. But morons like you are why we cannot have nice things, so enjoy your 5e.

>>53339584
>Is game balance the most important part of a system?

Yes. Of the elements you can control for when designing a game, balance is the most important. Theme and mechanics supporting the theme are also important, but you can do that much more easily.

Most people misunderstand balance to mean "everyone has equal DPR", when it's more like the lack of design elements that warp how the game is played, as opposed to how it's supposed to be played (or a lack of imbalance).

>>53351826
Components were never interesting.

>>53354681
This.

The idea that they're any kind of balancing factor in 3.PF is a stale meme at this point.

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>>53339584
Of course it is if you're a 4e player.

>>53357790
>it's not a real edition of D&D
>it just was made by the people who made D&D and was called D&D by them

That image never fails to crack me up.

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>>53357893
It really is funny. Especially considering that 3e broke with 2e in similar ways (and drew exactly the same sort of flak).

>>53340356
>why isn't there a mechanic built into the game that makes certain classes quicker to level up then others in order to keep things fair,

Because that doesn't actually work at all. It just means that which class exactly is bad for balance changes depending on what level or XP amount you use to start.

>>53340535

An RPG doesn't have to be decently made to feel balanced in the hands of a good GM. Literally any game system can be rewritten to the point that it's good. The value of a system is in how much or how little rewriting it requires.

>>53357790
>food analogy

>>53346876

The problem with investigative games in D&D isn't anything to do with magic, it's the fact that the GM has to build all investigative tools from the ground up and in almost every edition characters produced by the system who are geared towards investigation will have identical or nearly identical abilities, plus people have to know in advance that investigation is going to be important or else they might show up with characters with no significant investigative abilities at all.

>>53347021

5e alone is nearly half of all active games on Roll20. Shadowrun, all White Wolf games, all 40k and WFRP games, and all Star Wars games combined do not even match the popularity of Pathfinder, which is a distant second to 5e. All of the top three most popular games are editions of D&D (if you count Pathfinder). Five out of the top ten are either D&D or encourage the same sort of setting and plot hooks (counting both Pathfinder and Dungeon World).

Before 5e had the position of unmatched hegemony it does now, PF and 3.5 combined had a pretty similar position.

For better or for worse (it's for worse) D&D *is* tabletop RPGs.

>>53360995
I just started a purely homebrew campaign for a whole bunch of non-gaming friends and introduced the concept as D&D.

Because D&D is the only name they know the hobby by.

>>53340672
RPGs were conceived to relive vanilla settings like LOTR, Conan, etc. If you need a fancy setting to tell a good story, your stories are probably not all that good to begin with.

>>53339584
Is something important, but I think the most important thing in a system is if people are having fun with it. You can have without balance, it won't be easy, and it won't be for everybody, but you can fun with it, the moment you don't have fun it fails as a system though.

>>53361387
argh, wrong thread

>>53339584
I'd say fun is, but bad balance can undermine the fun pretty easily.

>>53359834
The difference between the two is that 3E built off of the worst parts of 2E(Skills & Powers, bad parts of Combat & Tactics) while blindly removing the parts of 2E that were 'bad' while 4E built off of the parts of 3E that were actually good while knowing EXACTLY why they were killing sacred cows.

>>53351999
We will.
And you can enjoy your 4e, since last time I checked, we didn't send the Inquisition out to burn all the copies.

>>53359834
>>53365870
I'm actually impressed by you guys holding onto almost 20 years of hate.

That letter in particular is amusing because the guy laments tossing the old saving throw system into the trash.