I suppose another dimension to this is that I play a lot of MMOs.

And when I've seen situations where rewards go to the individuals who get the kill/whatever, what I've found is that it leads to unpleasant behavior. (Like 'oh great, looks like healing gets dick-all for victory points in this scenario', kill-stealing, and so on)

While, yes, tabletop games aren't the same as MMOs, my experience with tabletop games suggests to me that some parallels exist.

For example, my big problem with 3e is that the focus of XP and reward for 'beating appropriately leveled monsters' shapes behavior immensely. You end up with people seeking out combat, a lot, and doing 15 minute workdays/nova bursts and generally 'grinding mobs' as much as possible. Because that's what is rewarded.
People start worrying more and more about combat effectiveness.

This mirrors similar things I've seen in MMOs.

On the other hand, MMOs where rewards primarily come from quest completion, people don't worry about trying to wipe out every nether-rabbit in the magic nether fields, but rather accomplishing goals.
Now, in MMOs, adventures are usually pretty boring, but in TT?

So, yeah, if you create a situation where X is rewarded, people are going to try to be good at doing that and do it a lot. Are you really sure you want to try to find every wrinkle and scheme and properly adjust rewards such that no exploits evolve? Do you really want to keep chasing your ideal reward scheme, rather than work on making an interesting plot or characters?

I've finally worked my way through all of the PHB, and I don't get what the big deal is. Sure, magic using classes are able to do various interesting and powerful things, but I don't really get how that crimps the style of non magical characters. They are just as fun to play, there is plenty for them to do, and they are powerful in their own right (depending, I suppose, on what you count as 'power').

In my experience, the character type who gets all the screen time in typical adventure action is a fighter of some sort (ranger, barbarian, tough bard, etc.) with some stealth ability, rugged enough to stand up to some punishment, and both a good missile weapon and a good melee attack. Someone like this can go all day every day, is able to influence the flow of action in almost any situation, and is busy most turns in or out of combat.

You can do that at 1st level with a bog-standard fighter in 5E. Magic users are cool and powerful, but the game can go on without them, and they aren't adventuring busy-bodies in the way I describe. Plus it is easy to kick them in the ass if they get uppity; demons, gods, other magicians, etc. are always waiting in the wings to give it to some magic using character that gets noticed.

Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;784627Because when me and my friends get together to play a game it's about having fun, not competing to see who has the largest "contributions to the game". I can't even imagine how that would be measured in any way other than "I like you more than I like her".

I always give out XP equally - even when players have to miss a session and someone else plays their character for them. XP is a measure of how experienced the characters are, not a Pavlovian reward for the players playing the way I want them to play.

In fact, the only House Rule I'm using in 5e is that we ignore XP completely and the characters simply goes up a level (together) when I say so.

That's not actually a houserule. It's one of the modes of play offered in Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

Quote from: Sommerjon;785228The problem with this for me is that dice are fickle.  I get less XP only because the dice was rolling bad for me?  That to me is an award for good dice rolling.

You are ignoring the other attributes to contribution e.g. strategy, innovative ideas, thinking around the problem, but certainly dice rolling may enter into it. Though, assuming people play with reasonably fair dice, dice rolling tends to average out over time so I tend not to get too worked up about how the dice roll.

QuoteXP charts aren't equal, I would go ape shit over this. I don't see a merit based method here.  Tenure perhaps.

XP charts weren't equal. By design.

Also you missed "a bonus for major contribution towards success."

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;785492That's not actually a houserule. It's one of the modes of play offered in Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

Ah. I don't have that - only the PHB and the Basic PDFs for monters.

I guess if it's an option in there it will probably also be an option in the DMG.

Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;785512Ah. I don't have that - only the PHB and the Basic PDFs for monters.

I guess if it's an option in there it will probably also be an option in the DMG.

I expect that'll be true, yeah.

Incidentally, I ran through episode 1 of Hoard of the Dragon Queen today and handing out XP instead of using their recommended milestones for advancement had the PCs hit level 2 fairly early, whereas they are only level 2 at the end of the first adventure with the milestone advancement.

Quote from: Bren;785498You are ignoring the other attributes to contribution e.g. strategy, innovative ideas, thinking around the problem, but certainly dice rolling may enter into it. Though, assuming people play with reasonably fair dice, dice rolling tends to average out over time so I tend not to get too worked up about how the dice roll.

Everything else you state that is factored into the way you do XP is directly imputed by the player.  Dice rolling is random.  Perhaps you want that little bit of randomness involved, I would ask why.

Quote from: Bren;785498XP charts weren't equal. By design.

I know I stated that already.
Back in the day most people(I played with) had thief or druid as at least their secondary character.

Quote from: Bren;785498Also you missed "a bonus for major contribution towards success."

I didn't miss it.  It is an unknowable quantity.

...

I did have this nice long play example for you, but whatever.  What you state is precisely why I don't use individual XP in level based games.

Quote from: Will;785408I suppose another dimension to this is that I play a lot of MMOs.

And when I've seen situations where rewards go to the individuals who get the kill/whatever, what I've found is that it leads to unpleasant behavior. (Like 'oh great, looks like healing gets dick-all for victory points in this scenario', kill-stealing, and so on)

While, yes, tabletop games aren't the same as MMOs, my experience with tabletop games suggests to me that some parallels exist.

For example, my big problem with 3e is that the focus of XP and reward for 'beating appropriately leveled monsters' shapes behavior immensely. You end up with people seeking out combat, a lot, and doing 15 minute workdays/nova bursts and generally 'grinding mobs' as much as possible. Because that's what is rewarded.
People start worrying more and more about combat effectiveness.

This mirrors similar things I've seen in MMOs.

On the other hand, MMOs where rewards primarily come from quest completion, people don't worry about trying to wipe out every nether-rabbit in the magic nether fields, but rather accomplishing goals.
Now, in MMOs, adventures are usually pretty boring, but in TT?

So, yeah, if you create a situation where X is rewarded, people are going to try to be good at doing that and do it a lot. Are you really sure you want to try to find every wrinkle and scheme and properly adjust rewards such that no exploits evolve? Do you really want to keep chasing your ideal reward scheme, rather than work on making an interesting plot or characters?

At some point, the accounting loses all purpose, and then I would say the fellow who dispenses with points and plays it by ear is quite sensible.

Again, there can arise a question of what purpose the whole "level up" business serves in a new context. Starting figures at 1st, or rocketing them past 12th - or whatever - just because of "tradition" might not be best for the group at hand.

Yeah, at a certain point it's worth taking a step back and going 'ok, why are we yet again doing Hero's Journey/Bildungsroman?'

Quote from: Larsdangly;785411I've finally worked my way through all of the PHB, and I don't get what the big deal is. Sure, magic using classes are able to do various interesting and powerful things, but I don't really get how that crimps the style of non magical characters. They are just as fun to play, there is plenty for them to do, and they are powerful in their own right (depending, I suppose, on what you count as 'power').

In my experience, the character type who gets all the screen time in typical adventure action is a fighter of some sort (ranger, barbarian, tough bard, etc.) with some stealth ability, rugged enough to stand up to some punishment, and both a good missile weapon and a good melee attack. Someone like this can go all day every day, is able to influence the flow of action in almost any situation, and is busy most turns in or out of combat.

You can do that at 1st level with a bog-standard fighter in 5E. Magic users are cool and powerful, but the game can go on without them, and they aren't adventuring busy-bodies in the way I describe. Plus it is easy to kick them in the ass if they get uppity; demons, gods, other magicians, etc. are always waiting in the wings to give it to some magic using character that gets noticed.

I'm not up on the particulars in 5e, but this has been a matter of debate and rules amendment since D&D was first published, if not before. There was a continuing flux through the original  supplements, to Advanced and Basic, and beyond.

In most pre-D&D heroic fantasy, the protagonists are preeminently warriors, at most occasional dabblers in sorcery; magicians are largely relegated to the roles of antagonists or mentors.

Once they were made player-characters, the tremendous and attractive game potential of magic was in certain ways placed at their disposal. However satisfactory those ways may have been at start - and for various reasons they never satisfied everyone - they strained as ever more powers were added.

There are three key questions:
1) What kind of game balance do we want?
2) Is that even possible?
3) How best to implement it?

Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;785154I wasn't laughing at people for choosing to play differently.

I was laughing at people for claiming that their way of playing was objectively more "fair" than mine and that my preference isn't actually a preference but merely me being too "weak" to do things in the "fair" way.

But yeah - it wasn't very classy of me, and I'll stop.

The whole discussion was more about politics than RPGs anyway, if you read the fairly blatant subtext.

Or, to paraphrase: "Every argument I've made has been shown to be biased and/or wrong, but instead of admitting that, I'll shift the playfield from actually concerning roleplaying games to a nebulous claim that it's all about  politics and then quickly cut my losses and run."

Wasn't throwing smoke bombs and then refuse to participate in a discussion not one of the tell-tale signs of actual trolling?

(Admittedly, there actually was an off-hand remark about politics before, in particular a reference to Maggie Thatcher, who by Blacky's logic here must basically be a socialist icon.)

I think the originally sought kind of balance was - when the game was run as intended - pretty well achieved throughout the TSR editions.

Trouble was, firstly, a lot of people didn't like that balance. It entailed a lot of mu mortality, the situation getting ever harder past name level (which was a challenge to attain in the first place).

So they 'fudged' in various ways.

But, secondly, they got attached to all the powers that had been piled on. So, now they had a class with huge advantages and without the intended offsetting disadvantages.

Then, some people wanted to keep all the above - or even add more! - yet somehow have fighters be as attractive as mus who could do what they could do, only better, and lots of other things as well.

That's pretty much three impossible things before breakfast.

I think Ars Magica works well, if it's the kind of thing you want; but it's a different kettle of fish from  D&D.

I've never really understood why anyone gets their shorts in a knot over game balance. This isn't tic-tac-toe: characters have many properties, some not defined by any number, and interact with a fluid environment, in an open ended series of events, with no clearly defined winners and losers. How am I supposed to decide who is balanced with whom? Perhaps these issues can be argued over for any edition of any game, but I don't remember anyone giving much of a shit about it before the advent of internet discussion forums. This is a made up problem, created by people with too much time on their hands.

Quote from: Larsdangly;785683I've never really understood why anyone gets their shorts in a knot over game balance. This isn't tic-tac-toe: characters have many properties, some not defined by any number, and interact with a fluid environment, in an open ended series of events, with no clearly defined winners and losers. How am I supposed to decide who is balanced with whom? Perhaps these issues can be argued over for any edition of any game, but I don't remember anyone giving much of a shit about it before the advent of internet discussion forums. This is a made up problem, created by people with too much time on their hands.

I never played through the A series.  This is a made up series, created by people with too much time on their hands.

Quote from: Larsdangly;785683I've never really understood why anyone gets their shorts in a knot over game balance. This isn't tic-tac-toe: characters have many properties, some not defined by any number, and interact with a fluid environment, in an open ended series of events, with no clearly defined winners and losers. How am I supposed to decide who is balanced with whom? Perhaps these issues can be argued over for any edition of any game, but I don't remember anyone giving much of a shit about it before the advent of internet discussion forums. This is a made up problem, created by people with too much time on their hands.

I think the main concern is that a game should not devolve into a "solved puzzle," because once that happens it gathers dust on the shelf. A corollary is that gamers don't like getting a bunch of useless components, but once they've got a playing piece or a chrome rule, they want to make it strategically important.

Before the advent, not of internet forums (pretty much before my time, although Compuserve and GEnie were the kind of thing to which I actually had ready access), but of the Web, I was hardly aware of people unsatisfied with the original kind of balance in D&D, although there were variants that implemented basically the same thing in different ways. There were people who preferred  other rules sets, but that's a different matter from "fudging" D&D.

That does not mean they were not out there, though. And clearly the demographic change that started with Basic and Advanced picked up steam through the 1990s.