Do you prefer having balanced or unbalanced parties?

Balanced parties, but wildly inconsistent and unbalanced threats.

I just don't give a fuck

>But obviously a party of all barbarians or something like that will only ever be stupid.
However, a party of all bards is awesome.

It depends. A deliberately unbalanced party can be fun if the people going into it are all on the same page.

Some of my favorite characters have been the ones that are useless in a straight-up fight (e.g. rogue with 8 Strength and 8 Constitution) but who makes up for it in other ways (e.g. silver-tongued charlatan who can just about talk anyone into anything). But if we're just going dungeon-crawling, well, that's probably not gonna work out so well.

Fortunately most of my groups have been much more roleplay-oriented since I got out of the cesspool that is Pathfinder.

Balance isn't all that important so long as everyone has a useful niche.

That's called asymmetric balance, and it is GOAT.

This is the kind of thinking that leads to niches being no longer useful or characters losing their niche.

But how would you evaluate the concept assuming it stayed true to its theory?

Play whatever class you want, but you need to think of what your party needs. A party of all martials or all one class can be fun though, I'd assume, but everyone needs an are of specialization so the amount of toes being stepped on is minimal.

And I say this as the bard in a party where three other people have charisma scores higher than mine.

I like balanced parties where nobody is completely useless in a given situation.

I don't expect a PC designed for social situations to be fighting up close and personal with a pack of wild dogs but I do expect them to attempt to shoot them with a handcrossbow from a sensible position or otherwise support whoever is at the front.

>Do you prefer having balanced or unbalanced parties?
FUN. You dumbass.

balanced or unbalanced gives way to Fun or UNFUN.

It's a concept that lead to crowbar use being a dark art and all traps being undetectable by normal means just so the thief class could have a reason to exist. I don't care how well it works when it works, it needs to die.

Balanced but varied.
>Great Combat, Bad Support
>Good Combat, Moderate Support
>Moderate Combat, Good Support
>Bad Combat, Great Support
D&D usually fails at this because your best support is also almost always your best combat because people like throwing fireballs around.

As a DM, balanced so I don't have to tailor nor care too much of the combat to the party and can focus on how the combat relate to the plot more.

Unbalanced tend to lent to TPKs if one of the stronger player fuck up or made a unlucky roll. Balanced allow others to still save the day even if the strongest is knocked down.

>it was done poorly once, so it's awful forever
I'll bet you're the sort who thinks the 20-sided die is inherently a bad thing, too.

Asymmetrical balance is the key.

Everyone has their niche own that serve their own purpose within the dynamic of the party structure in and out of combat but each player also have the ability to contribute to other niches but to a lesser extent.

The problem with d20 is that most games that use it don't use it effectively.

You know, part of me wants to make a d20 system where everything not directly handled by the DM or done automatically is a d20 roll, so you only have to have a d20 and no other dice.
But then I figure someone's already done it or that it would suck.
Something akin to
>Burning Hands
>Roll 1d20 + (Magic Modifier). Each creature in a 15-foot cone originating from your hands takes 3 damage for every 5 your roll exceeds their Magic Defense.

When you're dealing with a die where you're just as likely to get a [1] as you are to get a [20] and everything in between, it's hard to really have any sort of decent probability like you would from a d100 or a dice pool because the result is too swingy.

That and the range is so great that most of your effectiveness will come from the die, rather than from whatever bonuses you've managed to stack onto performing one particular action.

Balanced, but each can be good at their own thing. Some characters may be a face, others are mostly there for fighting.

I mean, christ, put a curve in there

Whether or not most of the effectiveness comes from the die depends on how high the bonuses are. I think it's pretty neat to see your character become less dependent on the dice the higher they get in level.

Takes forever to get anything done, only thing it ever accomplishes is seduction.

A d20 is literally just d100 where everything is measured in increments of 5. It's less granular, but not "more swingy".

>assumptions
>d100
d20 roll under systems like some old school games
>range is so great that most of your effectiveness will come from the die
Higher modifiers.

How on earth is a zoccihedron better?

>literally
no

Eh, it's nice and all on paper but in practice, it just makes the bonuses seem arbitrary after a while.
It's swingy because of the way crits work. You have a 5% chance to always succeed and a 5% chance to always fail and even in cases like skill checks, a +20 is still enough to pass most skill checks and a +1 is still ain't gonna do you much good.
That is true I suppose, it's just a shame that we mainly use the d20 engine more than the roll under mechanics from the earlier editions.
d100 doesn't refer to just the golf balls y'know.

...

>What are precentages

In what way do roll under systems change anything?

I mean, I looked at some of the numbers, and when you really look at the probabilities, a +4 modifier provides about the same bonus as an extra die in a d6 system when you're comparing things like 3d6 versus 4d6, 3d6 versus 5d6, and 4d6 versus 5d6. I really didn't believe it at first either, but the differences between the two methods are REALLY small.
It really just requires more modifiers- and it sort of fixes stuff like the off chance that 1d6+2 has a higher lowest value than 2d6.
I've been considering just going with 3d6 systems, but I've never really gotten into GURPS and I don't want to have to go through the billion sourcebook problem from 3.5 again.
>Critical successes and failures
Eh, I don't really like crits because they tend to dominate the context, if that makes any sense.
>I rolled a 1, that means I fucked up irredeemably
>I rolled a 20, that means automatic success
And for percentile successes, you're just making them rarer and thus even more important.

Fuck, that was a lot more redundant than I had intended.
Also
>percentile crits

I wish 5th brought back roll-under, it would have made the heavy bounding on stats less obnoxious.
>base number is your stat
>+proficiency if you have it, double for expertise
>-difficulty modifier
>roll d20 and try to get under that number

I think I get what you mean, but for percentile systems I (sometimes) think that's a bit apt, particularly for (as much as I hate GNS) simulationist games with a bit of grounding, so a 1/100 lucky break is within the realm of possibility. Also, there's the matter of "if there's no chance of success, why am I rolling?"

That doesn't seem like it would actually change anything, except that it would make odd numbers relevant which is nice.

Fantasy Flight's Star Wars does a good job with the basically impossible- When you want to try the basically impossible, you have to pay a Destiny Point up front, which gives no benefit other than allowing you to try, and you can't spend any more. Then the DM stacks up the difficulty based on everything that could possibly go wrong with your plan, then eventually decides on how many Setback and Difficulty (or even Challenge) dice he needs to put on the table to show how hard the attempt is going to be.

yes, but because you're referring to dice, they're "literally" very different things, one is huge and has 100 numbers on it, the other is 20-sided and famous. Or, if you're this wimp, , it might be two tens. The point is, they're literally different, functionally the same.

Except for the probability associated with each type of die.

In a nutshell, if we were going to track 10%, d100 would translate that percentage to 10 numbers while d20 would only translate that to 2 numbers.

Also, most d100 games have your skills being performed as a self-test where you roll under against whatever percentage you raised your proficiency to, meaning that the more proficient you become, the more likely you are to succeed.

However, with d20, bonuses granted from your skills don't matter within the grand scheme of things because
>1) the number to beat is divorced from how proficient you are at the skill.
>2) The bonuses are divorced from the value on the die.
>3) The die is where you're going to receive the biggest boon towards accomplishing whatever task you're rolling for.

The real problem comes from how bonuses are translated- a 20 STR character would succeed on a DC 10 80% of the time where a 10 STR would succeed 55% of the time.
>Proficiency bonuses are more influential
This is done moderately well in Saga Edition, where proficiency gives a straight +5 to the associated skill during character creation. This generally represents skills acquired before the game starts, so it makes sense that it's a high bonus but not an all-consuming one. This boosts a DC 10 check's chance of success to 95% for 20 STR and 80% for 10 STR. That's pretty considerable for low-talent characters, less so for high-talent characters. However, I can see why people don't like it.
Using that as a springboard, let me make a suggestion:
Skills should use 4-point degrees of success kind of like they already do, grading challenges on a curve as so:
>4: Casual
>8: Easy
>12: Average
>16: Challenging
>20: Daunting
>24: Teeth-Grinding
>28: Nearly Impossible
>32: Heroic
>36: Godly
So a level of proficiency should make Easy things Casual, Challenging things Average, and so on.
Ideally, heroes should get to the point where they can casually kick down a door the average person needs a battering ram for and do the basically impossible with ease. I mean, really, if you're a 20th level barbarian, by D&D's standards you should be squeezing water out of rock with your bare hands whenever you're a bit parched. Drizzt Do'Urden is a fucking 8th-level fighter by whatever standards Christopher Perkins has (which explains a lot about 5e design choices, really).

>It's swingy because of the way crits work.
>Implying that's the only way crits work.

It's not just swingy because of crits, it's swingy because the bulk of your rolls are determined by the value of the die moreso than the value on the bonuses you're using.

>also implying
That's a trait of specific games, not of the d20

What other games use a d20 and is as prolific as D&D or its d20 derivatives?

The system is irrelevant.
The discussion is about dice mechanics, and d20 is functionally the same as d100 (sans 2d10) in 5 point increments. Its like saying just because Shadowrun is popular, then every d6 dice pool system has to roll 20d6 a player, or that every 3d6 system has to have a source book for everything and have a 5 letter acronym. The d20 die is not DnD and is not tied to its mechanics.

Except that most games that focus on d20 are also games that were inspired by D&D. You can find multiple different games that handle dice pools differently but you'd be hard pressed to cite a d20 game that wasn't inspired by an edition of D&D.

Also, d20 is not functionally the same because while the d100 has 100 different values with each chance of success being determined by however high you made the skill, d20 is one where each value has an equal chance of appearing and your roll is dependent on how high you rolled on the die, rather than how high your bonuses are.

again, those are aspects of systems, not the dice. d100 does not mean you can only roll under the stat. You can do d100+mod. Likewise, You can do d20 roll under stat.

If we were arguing systems, you'd have a case.

That's dumb.

>So would you prefer chicken or steak?
>I want it to be cooked, not raw. That's what's important.
>...

No, I solved that soft-brained bullshit by converting ability score bonuses into extra dice and implementing a degrees of success subsystem.

Well, if you have a well-founded mistrust of the establishment you're eating in, making sure your meat is actually cooked makes sense as a priority.

>what is false equivalency
You're an idiot.

In every games I play, fighting skills don't mean anything about your role in the story, and the role of a player around the table.

We've ran OP fighters with other players playing commoners that were useless but very important. Everyone had their moment to shine.

We also played OP fighters with useless and totally unimportant commoner. They weren't relevant to combat or story lines, yet, the players were enjoying themselves. Both OP characters or not.

If anything, the only complaint I ever had was a player playing an OP character, judging the player of a useless commoner ''seemed to have too much fun around the table'' and was more likeable to the rest of the group than him. He wouldn't understand that playing an OP min/maxed bitch would turn off others in detriment to more living, true, fun characters. He wanted the spotlight because he fought well, others didn't give a shit about his fighting skill and were more impressed by the peasant speed milking his cows.

Fun times.

If he wants it cooked, he clearly doesn't want a steak, you dolt.

>What is being a merc
I don't see a problem in it

So ,you're a healslut.

i can do both but if unbalanced I need a Gm to address it.

I enjoy it when every character can contribute to the party. That doesn't mean that every character needs to be able to do the same amount of damage, but it does mean that you can't have one class that's only good for being a meat shield and one class that can heal AND be a meat shield. No, I don't care if the second class is worse than the first (unless the second class's niche is being a jack-of-all-trades that's not particularly good at anything); every character ought to be the best at something.

This is why I hate 3.PF so much - not because some classes are terrible (i.e. Monk), but because a wizard can do everything a fighter can do but better, PLUS stuff on his own. Balance isn't about every character being able to deal 3d8 damage with some generic, minor bonus effect (ranger slows, barbarian weakens armor, wizard sets on fire), it's about no character overshadowing another (wizard rolls 1d4 but fire deals damage over time, barbarian rolls 4d8 and ignores armor, ranger rolls 2d4 and paralyzes).

I would like a system using d20 if the average modifiers to the roll was in the +50 to +100 area, while highly competent people would be around +200. That way conflict between two equally matched opponents could go either way but more skilled opponent would beat the weaker almost every time, giving the best of the both worlds (excitment of swinginess and confidence from being skilled).

>You have a 5% chance to always succeed and a 5% chance to always fail
Even if that were the case, so what?

>Even if that were the case, so what?
It's hard to feel powerful knowing that at any point during combat, a shitty peasant can kill your level 20 Fighter if they get a continuous string of lucky rolls while you keep missing because of shitty luck.

I'm not saying that crits shouldn't exist but if they have to exist, they should be rare in proportion to much they can change the nature of an ordinary roll.

Why would a level 20 fighter be fighting a peasant?

It's good to have one player who can wreck a whole encounter, especially if they don't mind doing it all the time and doubly so if they don't mind taking a back seat during non-combat situations. It lets the other players focus on things that aren't directly related to murder.

Who the fuck knows why he's fighting a peasant, the point is that a crit shouldn't allow the peasant to auto-hit a dude who fights creatures that can take on deities while the level 20 Fighter shouldn't somehow miss a dude who plants turnips all day.

>You have a 5% chance to always succeed and a 5% chance to always fail

1 and 20 don't have to be crits/fails. Having static crit/fail values depending on min/max rolls is always stupid.

So it's a problem with the crit mechanics, not the dice. Just because the mechanic is shit doesn't make the dice more swingy than a fucking d100.

Making sure everyone has a useful niche leads to people no longer having a useful?

I like balanced parties where every character is versatile and capable enough could be adventuring on his own. Everyone has strenghts and weaknesses, but they should be able to solve any problem by themselves. Teamwork is always encouraged and good but never a must and nobody should depend on nobody, that's true balance and equality. So, balanced.

That's shit and limits the game to what niches they have. Acceptable at best for a one-shot, boring for a long campaign.

He's saying he doesn't care if it is balanced or unbalanced but whether or not everyone is having fun.

We've all read the all Barbarian party greentext. That was an unbalanced party but it seemed super fun.

What?

How could a party where everyone is the same class be unbalanced?

It's like saying a Ryu mirror favors Ryu.

Unbalanced in the sense that the entire party has a narrow skillset instead of having a balanced set of expertise among them.

I thought pathfinder was known for placing roleplay over crawls, compared to other editions?

NuD&D*. Original's Fighter-Mage-Cleric was the perfect balance.

Balanced.

Intentional misunderstanding or just plain that stupid?

It might be less about dungeon crawling than other dungeon crawlers but it's still a dungeon crawler, so that's not saying much.

>once
A slippery slope isn't a slippery slope fallacy of it actually happened. The introduction of the thief in PHB/Greyhawk was the start of the cancer he described, a class who's value existed only on limiting the previously available abilities of everyone, and it's that shortsighted meme that lead to the irredeemable cancer that is 3e and everything since, relying entirely on character builds since nothing can be done without it being on your sheet. Learn from history's mistakes or be doomed to repeat it.

4 members of my party are hardcore power players. This usually leads to the master pushing himself and buffing and moltiplying our enemies, wich makes the combat far more interesting for the test of us playing wacky builds. At least some amount of unbalance makes things more exciting, since every session my survival gets less granted

I love campaigns without healers bc damage seems much more real.

>Intentional misunderstanding or just plain that stupid?
You think "unbalanced diet" favors someone? Don't be obtuse, you knew veey well what we were talking about.

Have you considered classless systems run by GMs who haven't had a lobotomy?

>you knew veey well what we were talking about
Evidently you're the only one, then, because everyone else seems to be discussing intraparty balance, party role, mechanical equality between classes, et c.

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Classes serve a useful purpose and elegantly balance the party into discreet roles, just because skills, feats, race-and-class and every other tacked on cancer ruins that internal balance almost as bad as replacing gold for XP with combat for XP doesn't mean you should just eliminate them altogether, which will more likely than not only result in even heavier 'build' emphasis.

Thief didn't really limit anything.

The intent behind the class are somewhat murky, but the class abilities either work as "saving throws", i.e. you fail to roll under your str, you still got a 25% chance to climb that sheer surface OR they are superior to things everyone else can do; normal people don't have a chance to hide in shadows (not behind things, but just plain shadows), but the thief has (a pretty shitty) chance to be supernaturally competent.

I think it was the Acrobat that first actually retroactively limited shit.