I'm not sure if I can take the blog at face value, actually. I am wondering if the problem he thinks he has is the problem he's actually got? In 2E and 1E there was less fuss about balance, sure, but comparing it to 3E is apples and oranges - the system was made much more complex and codified pretty exhaustively, so there's alot more complex interactions going on (synergies between feats and the like).
That is, even if a houseruling 3E GM and a 2E GM actually cared about balance exactly the same amount, the 3E GM has alot more stuff to have to worry about. The pinnacle of 2e min/maxing is probably the dwarf fighter with a 18/00 Strength, an axe in each hand, and weapon specialization, while for 3.5 every new splatbook brought out a fresh crop of degenerate character builds.

Maybe he's got a valid problem for 4e, though, given that its a game where +1 to hit is exciting.

Well I always rather liked this website for telling it as it is (at least on the flawed argument front)

But really it comes down to this

Is your Stark Dichotomy somehow better than mine?

Looking back a little, I see perhaps I was not the most clear, so let me clarify a few things.

When I say Balance I mean balance amongst players.

You should have got that  from reading it , but really considering some of the responces... All those comments about players never being challenged or always expecting  a fair fight are bullshit. Let me point out the bad word... ALWAYS... Believe me , I believe in balance and I throw down encounters the pc's are not expected to win.

ALWAYS DEFEATED

As for that nifty viking game with twice as much black as white, that's cool, but I don't see it being played nowadays do you, especially not at an international level like chess and some other boardgames. I wonder why.

The game is quite obviously meant to teach something. Thats great, but most rpg's are not, which is why it makes a poor example.

VIKINGS DEFEATED

As for creativity and genre conciousness destroying games, I somehow have a hard time taking this more seriously than the barriers created by people who cannot comprehend that a bijillion and one houserules and am emphasis on "versimlitude and realism" over players enjoying themselves acts as a very real barrier to new players.

To go back to Ari, yeah its cool sometimes to give your players a golden dragon to ride on at level 1 (or a million gp or any number of silly things).
Sometimes its cool to just run your world and let your players hit the fan, but not so much as the player.

In no way should any of that be encoded into the rules or presented as the norm.

VERSIMLITUDE DEFEATED (for me at least, some people may genuinely value this over people and if you still have players, I would wager that you don't value this nearly as strongly as you think. I might be wrong but I got money on it )


 What really if what your doing is working for you, great, good for you. I really don't understand this hyperbole about "HURR DURR ITS NOT A RPG THEN" it honestly parses for me at a level of understanding of about duckquacks "QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK". There's lots of different ways to play (as is pretty fucking evident) and really who are you to be telling us what is and what is not rpg or a good rpg or fun or creative or anything.

That horse(Duck) can go fuck itself.

Joke time,

Q- How do you get A Grognard across the road without him shitting on everything?

A- Get several Grognards together so they all eat their own shit which is comprised of other grognards shit and make them circle each other arround.

Sure they'll never get across the road (such a thing would suggest that Grognards stop eating each others shit or actually move from their position ever) but it stops them from stinking up the place so much with their shitstained duckspeak.

Yep.  We all post when we're drunk and high sometimes.

Balance is a perfectly reasonable goal, and most of your tweaking should be done to make things more balanced in any case. The balance of the game is set to some abstract average or randomly generated campaign. As soon as you start introducing actual stories the fact that you keep fighting Fire Giants is going to make your Dwarven Ice Mage totally unfair even if in abstract his dwarven giant fighting techniques and magical anti-heat powers aren't a big deal. So to make up for it, you'll be doing some back end jiggering: throwing in some extra monsters to make up for the greater hitting power of the PCs and giving the party half-orc barbarian a very powerful magic ax so that they can compete.

Doing these kinds of on-the-fly modifications to the game world allows everyone to shine and that makes the cooperative storytelling more enjoyable for everyone at the table. What Ari Marmell is really saying is that he has discovered that he personally is so uncreative and bad at math that every time he sticks his oar in to change course a bit he makes things worse. That doesn't mean you should be a slave to the encounter guidelines, it means that Ari Marmell sucks at D&D.

Which raises the question of why Ari Marmell is allowed to write D&D these days, but we've been asking that question since his original betrayal over on EnWorld at the beginning of 4e.

-Frank

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384587Which raises the question of why Ari Marmell is allowed to write D&D these days, but we've been asking that question since his original betrayal over on EnWorld at the beginning of 4e.

I would be quite surprised if anyone buys his books, based solely on his name.  (He's no Gary Gygax).

With that being said, wonder what criteria WotC uses in determining which writers to hire whether for freelance or staff.  For many years, low mathematical ability, uncreativeness, etc ... doesn't seem to be a major consideration for WotC.

Quote from: ggroy;384589I would be quite surprised if anyone buys his books, based solely on his name.  (He's no Gary Gygax).

With that being said, wonder what criteria WotC uses in determining which writers to hire whether for freelance or staff.  For many years, low mathematical ability, uncreativeness, etc ... doesn't seem to be a major consideration for WotC.

If I understand the current crop of interviews on the subject it is:

• Living in the Seattle Area.
• Being brought in by someone who already works there.

Considr Ari Marmell's own response to Andy Collins leaving WotC employment:

Quote from: Ari MarmellWow.

Voluntary departure or not, he'll be missed. His efforts were more or less tireless, and on a personal level, he's responsible for a lot of the opportunities I've had so far in working with WotC.

Thanks, Andy. Fair winds and following seas in whatever comes next.

They seem to bring in new talent exactly the same way that you bring in new talent to a gaming group: someone who is a gamer moves into town, you invite them to sit in on a dungeon crawl, if they click well with your group, you tell them when the next session is going to be.

Which really gives the lie to the entire idea that the designers know better than you. WotC's D&D department is basically just a gaming club in Seattle filled with precisely the kinds of creative and useless individuals in precisely the same proportions as any other gaming group. People float to the top because of personal charisma or ability to write quantity on short notice. Not based on any quality standards at all.

WotC's D&D department is probably bigger than the people in your game, so there's a very good chance that someone on the design staff knows D&D better than anyone in your group. But each individual book is written by like four or five people, chances are excellent that the best gear head in your group is actually better at balance and design than any of the people who wrote any particular D&D book you pick up and read.

-Frank

Quote from: DeadUematsu;384554Yes, an evil DM touched my penis and now I hate everything RPGs stand for.

Now, will you leave me alone or is anything that isn't GM fellatio grounds for multiple page Stormbringer rage?

'Leave you alone'?  Did you notice the colour scheme here?  It's not purple.  If you are going to spew stupid shit, someone is going to point that out to you.  And they aren't going to be particularly polite about it.  These days, it happens to be me.

Whether you have extraordinarily shitty luck or extraordinarily shitty choice in game groups concerns me not in the least.  The point is, RPGs have game masters, and you should get used to the fact, or start playing games that don't have these.  Either way, your ability to generalize your experience to every single other experience means you are not very well suited to carrying on an adult discussion.  If you want to be all pissed off about that, too,  I won't stop you.  But let's not pretend that your inconsolable rage about losing your 2nd level Fighter to a pit trap all those years ago constitutes a valid data point in regards to the overall GM/Player paradigm.

EDIT:
I will guarantee that playing a game using only RAW would send you into a howling fury faster than all those GMs that ruined your game time in the past.  There are more rules in the books, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Who is providing the impetus for balanced games and balanced play? The designers? DMs? Players? And why?

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384593People float to the top because of personal charisma or ability to write quantity on short notice. Not based on any quality standards at all.

I've been bashing 4E since it was just a gleam in the eye of a Hasbro manager screaming at his lickspittles to make more goddamn money off that basement-dwelling freak customer base like they did with the Magic Pokemon cards or whatever the fuck it was, and even I think that's an unfair criticism.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384593If I understand the current crop of interviews on the subject it is:

• Living in the Seattle Area.
• Being brought in by someone who already works there.

...

They seem to bring in new talent exactly the same way that you bring in new talent to a gaming group: someone who is a gamer moves into town, you invite them to sit in on a dungeon crawl, if they click well with your group, you tell them when the next session is going to be.

Which really gives the lie to the entire idea that the designers know better than you. WotC's D&D department is basically just a gaming club in Seattle filled with precisely the kinds of creative and useless individuals in precisely the same proportions as any other gaming group. People float to the top because of personal charisma or ability to write quantity on short notice. Not based on any quality standards at all.

In other words, nepotism and the old boys club.

Quote from: Hairfoot;384596I've been bashing 4E since it was just a gleam in the eye of a Hasbro manager screaming at his lickspittles to make more goddamn money off that basement-dwelling freak customer base like they did with the Magic Pokemon cards or whatever the fuck it was, and even I think that's an unfair criticism.

Is it? Why does Bruce Cordell still have a job?

Remember when he did the Class Acts piece that was so bad that Andy Collins had to apologize for it? The one where it was revealed that Bruce Cordell didn't know any of the design guidelines (not even "Utilities don't do damage") of 4e D&D?

Yeah. Product so bad that the company has to do a recall and the brand manager (or whatever Andy's title was) had to apologize for it. And yet... Bruce Cordell was not replaced by a random guy off the internet who made a lot of 4e stuff or by one of the in-house interns. Or by any of the other overfull talent pools for game and world design they have at their disposal.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384599Yeah. Product so bad that the company has to do a recall and the brand manager (or whatever Andy's title was) had to apologize for it. And yet... Bruce Cordell was not replaced by a random guy off the internet who made a lot of 4e stuff or by one of the in-house interns. Or by any of the other overfull talent pools for game and world design they have at their disposal.

Since very few of us rpg message board posters are employees of WotC with any significant power to hire or fire, what we say here is largely irrelevant in the end.

I suspect that whatever WotC D&D division employees are lurking around on these rpg message boards, they're laughing in our faces and think we're all stupid schmucks.  They must get a kick out of people getting angry and complaining about their shoddy products.

I'm sorry to say it Frank, but I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Mearls is largely laughing at all your posts criticizing him.  (Mearls and company, are probably laughing at all my posts too if they ever bothered to read any of mine).

Quote from: StormBringer;384594'Leave you alone'?  Did you notice the colour scheme here?  It's not purple.  If you are going to spew stupid shit, someone is going to point that out to you.  And they aren't going to be particularly polite about it.  These days, it happens to be me.

You're absolutely right. This is TheRPGSite and you're free to be a complete fuckwad you always have been. Don't ever let me stop you, you shining example of dipshit.

QuoteWhether you have extraordinarily shitty luck or extraordinarily shitty choice in game groups concerns me not in the least.  The point is, RPGs have game masters, and you should get used to the fact, or start playing games that don't have these.  Either way, your ability to generalize your experience to every single other experience means you are not very well suited to carrying on an adult discussion.  If you want to be all pissed off about that, too,  I won't stop you.  But let's not pretend that your inconsolable rage about losing your 2nd level Fighter to a pit trap all those years ago constitutes a valid data point in regards to the overall GM/Player paradigm.

You're so off base but your trollish expression of concern heartens me.

QuoteEDIT: I will guarantee that playing a game using only RAW would send you into a howling fury faster than all those GMs that ruined your game time in the past.  There are more rules in the books, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Ah, no. In fact, those who do tend to be the more level-headed and enjoyable DMs I've had. While those who don't more often than tend to be erratic and far less enjoyable.

I am a bit of an iconoclast I really don't think there are any perfect systems. You always have to taylor stuff for your table and most games have got a bunch of stuff that to paraphrase Nils Bhor owes more to the designer than to any semblence to real play.

But I notice that quite a large number of folks on here have pet games that they will defend to the hilt even though they gladly comment on others games faults.

Pundy defends Amber (although he does admit the Magic system needs work) even though the whole unarmed martial arts versus armed combat is riddled with inconsitency.

AM will hear nothing said against 4e even when the maths of skill challenges is laid before him.

Benoist told me AD&D wasn't for me because I thought racial level limits should be replaced with a racial xp penalty.

Jeff37923 will hear no ill spoken about the fact that Traveller characters start off too old and the effects of aging seem to be pretty severe and there are no tech solutions.

Koltar, well just never dis Gurps or he'll have your head off with his Bath'leth.

(All these examples are off the top of my head so take no umbrage, the fact they stayed with me is proabably a good thing).

Its not just here. When I posted on the Pinacle forum that the model used for combat movement , in which players make their whole move then attack sequence in in initiative order, would be improved in some circumstances by staged movement I was shot down for no reason other than I didn't understand the rules....

I find this pretty odd.

When I grew up we played fast and loose with the rules. I was designing my own games from when I was 12. I treat all games that hit my table as my preserve to strip out and rebuilt at my whim.

A common complaint is "you are complaining about a game but you aren't playing it right", no matter than your answer is I played it right I though it could be fixed so I changed it and no I am not complaining any more, but I thought I would share.

So any ideas? Why are some of us so emotionally attached to some systems whereas some of us happily accept there is generally a better way to do everything and all systems are inherently flawed.

Does this extend into RL? Are the guys that are sticklers for rules in RPGs the same guys that defend the last episode of Lost even though its got more holes than a seive, Or do they perhaps all work for the IRS?

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384587Balance is a perfectly reasonable goal

Yes. A basic rules balance is actually a good thing. An obsession over perfect, absolute rules balance certainly isn't, IMO. I think the D&D design shifted priorities in this regard in favor of the latter some time ago. It started with 3rd ed. It's not a specific 4e thing in my mind. Even though 4e's worse in terms of questing for absolute game balance, it's just the natural extension of ideas that originally blossomed during 3e's run.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;384587and most of your tweaking should be done to make things more balanced in any case.

Nope. It should be made to make the game awesome. What "awesome" means in this instance will vary from gaming group to gaming group, and it doesn't necessarily mean "balanced on a theoretical basis grounded in rules taken in a vacuum, with an 'average' gaming group in mind which, in fact, doesn't exist, and doesn't necessarily represent our personal and specific needs".

Sometimes, awesome will mean light sabers in Greyhawk that do 8d6 damage with no save.