Game Balancing

yeah that is tricky. i think there are a lot of dynamic combat options which are quite obviously worthless.

if you watch dynamic action sequences in films the fighters will often utilize objects in the environment. kicking a table at enemies or pushing over a bookshelf. sometimes new players will try to do fun and flashy stuff like this in d&d and ultimately it is always disappointing. it would be nice if this kind of improvisational combat flair would pay off. i certainly give my players inspiration dice for doing fun stuff.

d&d allows for a lot of free-form interactions with speaking and spells but when it comes to combat the best and only option is generally to swing with your main weapon. i would love to seem a more fleshed out fighter system with parries, stances, and feints.

If you actually play D&D 3.5 RAW the classes aren't very imbalanced at all.
Yes, they have different power curves, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The problems are that nobody wants to play it exactly RAW because it honestly isn't very fun.
And that their DM doesn't put the work into making sure the party stays balanced.

>If you actually play D&D 3.5 RAW the classes aren't very imbalanced at all.
[Citation Needed]

The fact that the fighter is a less useful party member than say, a Paladin, Barbarian, Ranger, Magus, Warpriest, etc, is easily demonstrable.
He can offer comparable damage output and toughness to soak up hits, but he's a one-trick pony.

>If you actually play D&D 3.5 RAW the classes aren't very imbalanced at all.

I seriously hope you get hit by a car for saying this. Just shut the fuck up. No. Stop. You are wrong. What you are trying to say has been DISPROVEN REPEATEDLY ON THIS FUCKING WEBSITE yet you insist on blaring it in every thread. No, you are wrong, get. the. fuck. out. We are done iwth your shit. You are denying reality and you know it. You are delusional. It is time to stop, it is time for you get out of this thread and go play in traffic. I seriously hope you and your children are hit by a car and your brains are splattered down the cold freeway at night and it takes 45 minutes for the ambulance to arrive on a cold night to find your remains. Listen up, fucker. The martials in 3.5 literally do not function. Fighter is not even a fucking class, it's a fucking NPC class. Fighter as a class literally does not function. Monk? Literally does not function as a class. Anything it can do a wizard can do by snapping its fingers. Same with ranger, pally and barbarian. They are all irrelevant classes. If you play a barbarian you are literally irrelevant on the battlefield. A wizard can instantly defeat you. The game. does. not. function. PERIOD. Get it thruogh your thick skull before continuing to post.

See, you've already fallen into the trap of using squishy meaningless words like "less useful"
It doesn't really mean anything towards the question of whether the classes are balanced, but it sounds like it supports your viewpoint.

I also guarantee you have never played a campaign, from level 1 to 20, of D&D 3.5 playing RAW.
You might think you have, but I'd bet that's just because you aren't familiar with all the rules.

The game functions only if you ban core.

That's how fucked up the game is.

I stopped reading about 6 words in when I realized you are an emotional wreck and aren't worth having a conversation with.
Just fyi.
Feel free to vent more emotions by replying though.
I'll just hide the post, no worries.

>squishy meaningless words like "less useful"
What the fuck else would game class balance mean in a coop game? Yes, less useful. Because that's what matters.

If I play a (most classes) *RAW*, I will have a wide variety of class features to help me solve the situations that come up during a campaign, including combat.

If I build a fighter, I can murder stuff. Any time we need something other than murder, I'm as useful as a bag of bricks. Meanwhile, a Paladin is just about as good at murder, but has a wide variety of limited use abilities for several other situations.

I know it's frustrating, but it's literally no use.

The people who respond to reason and evidence are already well aware that 3.5's core class imbalance is a nigh on impossible gulf between the low and high ends. As you say, it has been proven hundreds of times and doesn't even merit arguing anymore.

The only people saying otherwise are either trolls or the terminally stupid so incredibly invested in their favourite game they refuse to admit even its most blatantly obvious flaws.

You're conflating the utility and adaptability of a class with its relative balance.
The two are not the same concepts.

For example, you might have a class which can only use ranged attacks,
but it is so good at doing so, that it eclipses all other classes, and renders all encounters meaningless.

So you might think fighter is a bad class because it is boring, 1-dimensional, ect.
And that might be true.
There are arguments to be made.
That's not the same thing as being imbalanced.

If you run a RAW mid power, level 20 party, against a CR 20 encounter, you might find the classes aren't as imbalanced as you think.
Not that this is a great defense of the system, since playing RAW is not fun, as evidenced by the fact that nobody does it, but still, these are the facts.

You're very emotionally invested in hating a thing you probably don't even play.
Do you ever think about that?

>You're conflating the utility and adaptability of a class with its relative balance.
I'm not conflating, I'm outright claiming those are just as important elements to class balance as raw power, if not more so, and disputing your claim that raw combat power is not an accurate measure of class power.

>If you run a RAW mid power, level 20 party, against a CR 20 encounter, you might find the classes aren't as imbalanced as you think.
The game is more than combat encounters that can be solved via murder.

But even IN combat, the fighter is going to struggle against enemies who are resistant to regular damage and dish out something other than HP damage (like a level-equivalent upgrade of the "Shadow") for instance, because the fighter's only real option is HP damage.

But the game, as mentioned includes more than combat encounters. A fighter is useless when you need scouting, Investigations, Interrogation, Negotiations, Encounter Avoidance, or Quick Escapes.

You're better off with a martial that has more complimentary utility abilities, like Paladin, or Magus, or WarPriest, or Slayer, or Hunter, or Synthesist, or whatever.

>disputing your claim that raw combat power is not an accurate measure of class power.
>disputing your claim that raw combat power *is* an accurate measure of class power.
Whoops. Rephrased that sentence and apparently missed a word from how I phrased it initially.

You're just making circular arguments and not actually addressing my counterpoints.

>DnD's problem is relative class imbalance
Sort of.

There's also the issue of some monsters being set up to absolutely trash the Fighter (basically anything with special abilities geared toward something other than hitting stuff hard).

On the other hand, a lot of that comes from the monsters in question being pseudo spellcasters via SLAs and the like.

Plus Fighters get fuck all outside of combat, so balancing everyone (including the monsters) down to the Fighter's power level would help combat but noncombat would be pretty shitty unless you rebalanced that around the assumption that everyone would have 10ish Int and 2+ skill points per level with barely any class skills.

Your counterpoints are based on a premise I'm calling faulty.
>"The two are not the same concepts."
I'm disputing the premise first and foremost. The two are both contributing parts of what constitutes "class balance".

>"For example, you might have a class which can only use ranged attacks,
but it is so good at doing so, that it eclipses all other classes, and renders all encounters meaningless."
Even if you have such a class, the moment they run into an encounter that can't be solved by ranged attacks, they're useless.
And even if they're broken powerful in their context, if I can have a weaker but still highly effective ranged combatant, who is useful in other situations, they're a more useful member of the team, and they have a class that contributes more to the group.

>So you might think fighter is a bad class because it is boring, 1-dimensional, ect. And that might be true. There are arguments to be made.
I do think it's one-dimensional. And they are kind-of boring. The fact that the fighter has nothing to contribute when there's no combat going on will often hinder his fun, as he sits around twiddling his thumbs until either character abilities are irrelevant, or until he can murder something.

But:
>That's not the same thing as being imbalanced.
Boring is not makes them weak as a class. It's the fact that their 1-dimensional nature makes them bad party members in comparison to the alternatives. They only contribute to the situations wherein murder is a good solution.
They're worthless a good chunk of the time (how much will vary depending on the campaign).

....

...
>If you run a RAW mid power, level 20 party, against a CR 20 encounter, you might find the classes aren't as imbalanced as you think.
>"If you cherrypick specifically the thing the fighter is decent at, and ignore the rest of the campaign, the fighter holds up pretty well!"
Yes, in that small circumstance, he does. Outside that small circumstance, he does not.

If you're just running combat encounters, the fighter won't lag behind nearly so much as in a real campaign (though he will often struggle when his chosen attack routine isn't very effective, even in combat, because he doesn't have much in the way of alternatives).

Looks like a false dichotomy to me.

At low levels everybody already is nerfed down to fighter levels. Casters and skill-characters get their hacks, which are circumstantially very powerful, but they're all as tough as glorified commoners while the fighter gets to be a much bigger combat threat. And it's not just that he can survive combat (with better armor and weapons to help), its also that he can survive falls and ambushes and traps and snakebites, so he can take risks that the other PCs can't and contribute outside of combat.

All you have to do is scale that relationship up as everyone gains levels. The fighter's damage shouldn't be the best, but it should be the most reliable and least circumstantial, and he should be the hardest character to shut down, and he should have the survivability to take risks that a different class wouldn't.

Once the rogue is Aladdin, the fighter should be Mulan.

Once the wizard is Gandalf, the fighter should be Conan.

Once the sorceress is Elsa, the fighter should be Gilgamesh.

And if the wizard is Elminster, and you still HAVE fighters at that power scale, they should be godlike juggernauts, with some considerable resistance to the machinations of an Elminster. But some people wouldn't have 'fighters" at that level, they would fill the high-powered toughguy roll with something else, and that's fine too.

I dunno, the fundamental question never seemed that hard to me, all you need is good game design.

Wait, wait,

BEOWULF is Elsa's meatshield. I meant Beowulf.

If there IS a classic fighter on Elminster's power level it's Gilgamesh.

Is this your thing now Richard Petty? Riling people up with retardation and claiming that they've never played the game when 3.PF's faults have been proven over the decade that its been a thing.

Cuz I gotta say, pretty pathetic desu. You're not even saying anything worthwhile, you're just spouting nonsense that even /pfg/ would balk at if you tried to post it in the general.

A person can play 3e for years and years and experience it as a fun and balanced game simply because they didn't try to break it. That's your problem, and that problem isn't going away. Those players exist, and they had their fun, and a lot of them are still having it, and nothing you say or do is going to make them go away.

Stay mad my friends.

Stop making threads about 3e.

>A person can play 3e for years and years and experience it as a fun and balanced game simply because they didn't try to break it.
If we were looking at this from the perspective of a single-player game then maybe you'd have a point.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of game, you, as a player, are going to be forced to have your enjoyment of the game as a whole be determined by at least two other people and whether or not they aren't being total asshats who make your character obsolete, to the point where your presence makes no difference to the grand scheme of the game.

People who have been playing for years are aware of 3.PF's issues, so they take steps to lessen the issues so that everyone has fun and contributes to game.

The real problem are the trolls and the idiots who pretend that the problems don't exist, so they never actually plan around them until it suddenly becomes an issue for someone at the table.

Also, "stay mad," really?

Those people aren't idiots, that's my point. They're just 3e players.

I am asserting that you can play with a group of people, or even multiple groups of people, for years, across several campaigns and many different characters, and still think that 3e is a fun and balanced game, because their experience tells them that 3e is a fun and balanced game.

A lot of people on Veeky Forums don't account for how many players just aren't that competitive and don't try to break things (even though, yes, 3e can break without you trying to break it), and also do not account for just how many games never go past level 8.

In short, there will ALWAYS be people who think that 3e's problems don't exist, and they aren't trolls or idiots. And I mock anyone who can't accept that. Even as someone who has been in these trenches, even as someone who was usually making anti-3e arguments whenever we actually talked about the craftsmanship of the game, I don't find it hard to accept the existence of people who love 3e and think it's a good game.

Many of us still actively play some form of 3e, because, for whatever reason, we haven't found a system that scratches the itch that it does, nearly as well.

For me, I still play 3.x because it gives me mechanics for a high powered tactical RPG with a wide variety in viable options and playstyles, highly customizable characters, and a wide variety of published adventures and adversaries.

I tend to play/run in the level 6-15 range, emphasis on 10-14, with Tier 1, 2, and 3 Classes.

Thus far the only system I've tried that comes close is M&M, and its gameplay was simply too bland and repetitive.

One of these days I'll try out HERO as a PF Replacement.

But, in short, we're not going to stop playing 3.X anytime soon, it scratches itches that are not scratched by many other games.

3e can be a good game without having good balance.

And yes, many campaigns end before 3es balance problems become prevalent.

But as I mention in , there are also groups of players who don't start at level 1, and play primarily in level ranges other than 1-8, when its issues are obvious.

Someone not acknowledging that a game has issues does not mean those issues don't exist. It simply means that person is wrong.

>In short, there will ALWAYS be people who think that 3e's problems don't exist, and they aren't trolls or idiots. And I mock anyone who can't accept that.
This whole post is the greatest defense of 3e I have ever seen.
And possibly the only sane one.

For the record, I play 2e.

3e has issues, and anyone denying that is wrong, sure. These people can only speak from their own experience, and they should listen when other players talk about the ways in which 3e can and does ruin their fun.

But there are a lot of people on Veeky Forums who think that you can't like 3e without being an idiot, and that anyone who plays 3e is guaranteed to experience game-ruining balance problems. And that's nonsense. There's a reason why 3e was so successful that it resurrected the RPG industry: it's a good game.

Does it have problems? Oh yea. And at this point I would honestly never recommend 3e to anyone, if someone wants to learn a new game, and they want a huge quantity of options, and I think that they would SPECIFICALLY enjoy the kind of sprawling simulationist dungeon-crawl-kit that 3e represents, then I will point them to 5e. And in a lot of cases I'd tell them to try something other than D&D anyway. But it will never surprise me to see new players stumble onto 3e and get just as excited about it as I did back in the 2000s. It's a good game.

I played a little 4e, around the time that 5e was announced. Honestly, though, I mostly just went from 3e to homebrews, never really adopting a new system to replace it.

Level 20 isn't mid power. It's practially max power.

>There's a reason why 3e was so successful that it resurrected the RPG industry
Yeah, having a very low barrier to entry(trap options and shitty design not withstanding) and an absolutely fucking insane market presence because of the OGL, it coming right off of the heels of wildly successful D&D games like Baldur's Gate that built a ton of interest in the game because along with Fallout, it revived its own genre, and all of its major competition(RIFTS, Shadowrun, WoD) sputtering out or exploding. That game didn't happen in a vacuum.

Yeah, the people who think you can't like 3e are idiots. Balance is not the sole determiner of fun. My favorite fighter is marvel vs Capcom 2, and it's one of the worst balanced fighting games around.

But I agree while heartedly. 3e but has balance issues, and is a good game.

I would, and do, advise of over 5e to people, depending what they're looking for. Pf is highly customizable, the character options are all online for free, and conveniently organized, and it supports high powered tactical gameplay. But I don't pitch PFRPG as a good generic fantasy game, that's not really what it is. It's a good fantasy superheroes game with lots of customization and a charop subgame built in.

If they just want dungeoncrawling fantasy, I point them at 4e, 5e, HARP, , or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, depending what it sounds like they want.

Shapechange.

All very true.

>I'm not gonna make a proper post, I'll shill a youtube channel instead

>If you run a RAW mid power, level 20 party, against a CR 20 encounter, you might find the classes aren't as imbalanced as you think.

Define mid level. Even going classic Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric, the wizard and cleric are going to be magnitudes more important in a level 20 fight than the fighter and rogue. And they will be even more important getting up to the moment of that fight.

Core Batman wizard isn't so much raw as "the autistic rules lawyer who rolled wizard/cleric made the dm his bitch"

A lot of assumptions require an incredibly generous interpretation that to some extent only makes sense if your understanding of english is well below fluency.

>YouTube video explains in detail, with examples, why nerfing stuff is an unpopular approach to rebalancing any game.
>Ergo, nerfing 75% of the character options is also not going to go over well.

What does this "Batman wizard theory crafting" bitching have to do with the observation that nearly all classes have at least some number of utility or non-damage based abilities for different situations, whereas the fighter does not.

Nobody is talking about Batman wizard here but you.

One of the real problems is D&D past about 7th level is not your childhood's D&D.
Dungeons don't make sense, most of the iconic monsters are not a danger, or aren't a danger in the way they were, or have to be ninja half-dragon upsized variants.
Town encounters don't make sense. Glibness makes RP into nonsense. The martials could kill the town. The Wizard is by default as dangerous as an infantry regiment, and should be getting respect as same.

A mid to high level campaign looks nothing like low level, and low level is where almost all the existing D&D media is. The animated series, the movies, the popular novels... There's a persistent theme of level 3 wannabees who get an artifact boost in the final act of the story.

The reason people suggest nerfing the other classes to the capabilities of the fighter is an attempt to make a 20 level game that only covers the fist seven levels of D&D's power structure, and do the rest of the high-level encounters with DM fiat. Just like the movies.

4e wasn't so much "superhero comic" as "ultimately, you must disable all foes through hit point damage."

I don't really get it. In old school D&D, level 20s and level 7 chars aren't very far off from each other.

They just keep ramping up the differences between levels. in 1e core, a level 5 party is able to take on the strongest non unique dragon in the game (an 88 HP red dragon) and win, despite the fact that it kills nearly the entire party. Now there's no way to do that.

The only thing that changed is a "you must be this tall to fight this person" sign, and that sucks and serves no benefit. The whole POWER LEVELS?!? shit was a massive disservice to D&D.

At least it LOOKS like in 5e, they did a lot to dispel this crap and cut high level chars down to size, but in no way are high level chars supposed to be invincible. In the works of Zelazny and Moarcock, world killers still can be put into mortal peril by handfuls of ordinary guards/flunkies.

>I don't really get it. In old school D&D, level 20s and level 7 chars aren't very far off from each other.
Good point, I should have clarified:
Most people are looking for the first seven levels of 3.pf's power structure.

Your post nails it.

Which makes sense when you think about what HP represents supposedly.

Yeah, mostly via expanding what HP or 'Reduced to 0 HP' meant. Hence stuff like the bardic abilities that do Psychic damage by ruining enemy morale.

Not all works of Zelazny and Moorcock. I get your point, but there were also times when characters were at the top end of the power curve. By the end of the History of the Runestaff Dorian Hawkmoon was a one man army, while in Zelazny's Lord of Light the Gods are almost beyond the reach of the mortals around them.

Or it can allow them actually to be fighters. Block fire breath with a shield, cut limbs. Actually kill enemies with their attacks without the need to string a long line of feats to achieve that result.

Though you'll still need to make magic work more with the general system so that spells can be interacted with. So that you can use shields, armor, cover and other things vs them.

>Not all works of Zelazny and Moorcock.

well I did say "can."

Being able to kill a Lord of Chaos does not make you unable to have extreme difficulty with a handful of lizardman things or with a small group of guards, and being able to blow up a whole fucking fortress with the power of WIZARDNESS (one that generally ignores the normal conventions of magic in your setting) doesn't make you proof versus an arrow to the eye.

There, no doubt, are XXXL shitruiners who are impervious to normal men, but however you cut it, there is tons and tons of precedent for S&S chars being able to hit way above, or way below, their weight class. Same as in the TSR era. That's how it should be... generally.

Exceptions abound.

That's probably due to lack of layered defenses. Wizard in D&D can run a dozen protective spells lasting a whole day. So he is mostly immune to small attacks.

Compare it to say Slayers (anime). It's a pretty high powered world. But a great wizard can have up to two spells at max at the same time. Most get by with one. So Lina flying and dropping fireballs on people is not only scary because her fireballs is really powerful but also because she can do it at the same time.

>Wizard in D&D can run a dozen protective spells lasting a whole day.

That's mostly a 3e thing. Stoneskin, admittedly, was the beginning of the end in Unearthed Arcana (iirc), although there's no guarantee you'd ever find it.

AD&D's version of stoneskin was also mainly insanely expensive.

Yeah, 4e was a lot better on that front. Your big defensive stuff was either gunna last 5 mins or a single turn.

Encounter defensive buffs almost never last said encounter. It's generally Encounter = Single attack/turn, Daily = Lasts the encounter (Or has a massive single effect)

4e also made buffing your fighter actually a better idea than buffing yourself.

It's one of those things that bugs me about 3.PF. People trot out the 'Fighters are meat shields' line, but there's almost nothing in the rules to let them actually fill that role. It's often trivial for monsters to get past or around them, so buffing their defences was always a bad idea compared to buffing your own.

To be fair, when I played AD&D, I both avoided it because I thought it was OP as a player, and as a DM I avoided poisonous/energy draining monsters because I thought they were OP as well. We had sort of a "Cold War" philosophy where we would avoid seemingly OP stuff.

Nowadays I would consider Stoneskin a reasonable spell, due to level drainers, enemy casters, and how cheap men at arms are.

Yeah. I'm iffy on 5e but I find their Concentration keyword fascinating.

Yeah, 4e's mark system was kinda great. I loved how all the defenders used it differently, despite the same basic mechanic.

Pretty much every edition of D&D has solved this problem, either by making the balance not fucked to begin with or offering alternatives like the Tome of Battle.

The Tome of Battle/Path of War is one of the only things I like about 3.PF.

It's also depressingly common to see it being banned for stupid fucking reasons.

Tome of Battle is good, but 99% of the time I only make cursory use of it since martial maneuvers are so limited.

One of the only things that makes me wanna use homebrew is that kick ass Mage Slayer PrC that combines magic, fighting and martial maneuvers into one whole. Legitimately my favorite archetype.

But then you have issues like , where those things are cast off as "broken" or "OP" because they fix a problem that some people don't see as a problem.