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Cosi
2016-03-16, 04:13 PM
Continued from this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?479299-What-is-your-worst-roleplaying-game) thread. While this is obviously a response to Neon, I'm actually much more interested in other people's thoughts.


How are you defining low, mid, and high levels?

It doesn't matter. The claim is system agnostic. You're getting a fixed bonus for "free", but you don't ever get more than a certain amount of power. The progression looks like this:

Low Level - You are better than other people. You each have the same amount and kind of stuff, except some of your stuff is worth more than normal.
Mid Level - One or both of two things happen. First, it's possible that your "free" bonuses are simply not large enough relative to what you get from progression to matter at this point. Second, you will eventually hit a cross-over point where whatever you getting for "free" equals what you are giving up in terms of progression and you are just as powerful as someone else who did not take the "free" power (technically, this assumes advancement is continuous, so it is not true in all systems). Overall, you don't get any net power at this point.
High Level - Your "free" stuff is less than your lost advancement. You suck.

It doesn't matter which numbers you plug in. You rock early, you're neutral eventually, and then you suck. It doesn't matter if the game goes to level ten thousand or only level ten. It technically does matter if the progression cap is lower than the racial level cap, but then the level limits are just wasted space.

This isn't even game design, it's math. You have two functions (functions of integers greater than or equal to zero):

E(x) = x + 4, for x < 7 and = 10 for x >= 7.
H(x) = x

For the interval (0, 9), E(x) > H(x). At 10, E(x) = H(x). At 11 or more, E(x) < H(x).


In almost any RPG other than D&D 3.X the spells you actually choose to master are a part of your character.

Off the top of my head, Scion had items which gave people magical powers that worked for anyone (well, any Scion) who used them.


the SGT was not part of the design of D&D.

The SGT is just the application of the encounter rules of 3e. A level X PC is supposed to beat CR X monsters half the time. Saying the SGT is "not part of the design of D&D" is like saying airplanes aren't part of the laws of physics. There's no physical principle that creates airplanes, but they exist entirely as a result of applying the laws of physics towards a goal (namely: flying). Similarly, the SGT is the result of applying the rules of the game towards a goal (namely: providing an objective measure of character balance).


Third, places the 3.X wizard is broken. First their ability to bypass the entire hit point system without seriously weakening their effectiveness (something which, as I have mentioned, was not present in prior editions of D&D because 3.X screwed up the saving throws). Second the free spells from any school you get. In AD&D a specialist wizard learned one spell of their school per level - and a generalist learned none. Third, the magic item purchase rules allowing you to buy scrolls very easily (a vast change from TSR D&D when swords were the most common magic items). Fourth the magic item creation rules.

What? I have no idea where you are coming from to get that list of broken options. Don't get me wrong, there are broken things in 3e. Minions are absurdly powerful, shape changing magic is insanely complicated and totally broken, and there are issues with other things (non-slot costs and spell emulation, action economy, Persist Spell). You could even talk about specific tactical paradigms like the teleport ambushes. But that list maps to zero things that are broken. Point by point:



First their ability to bypass the entire hit point system without seriously weakening their effectiveness (something which, as I have mentioned, was not present in prior editions of D&D because 3.X screwed up the saving throws).
Bypassing the hit point system is not necessarily broken. It would certainly be weird if monsters had hit points and everyone killed them by applying status effects like "turned to stone" or "dominated" or "dead" on failed saves, but that wouldn't be "broken" unless it was above the intended balance point. Unless you can prove that, all you're really saying is that you personally like blaster Wizards more than SoD Wizards.


Second the free spells from any school you get. In AD&D a specialist wizard learned one spell of their school per level - and a generalist learned none. Third, the magic item purchase rules allowing you to buy scrolls very easily (a vast change from TSR D&D when swords were the most common magic items).
This is just the standard "options are broken" meme that gets circulated for no good reason, with some added grognard-isms for good measure. Fundamentally, choosing options at different times only matters if you have different information. Consider the following game:

I will flip a coin, you will call it, and if you call it correctly you get a dollar. What are your odds of success in the following cases:

1. You win if it comes up heads.
2. Call it before I flip it.
3. Call it after you see the result.

Hopefully, this is simple. Despite having "more options" in the second case, you can't improve your odds past 50/50 (assuming the coin is fair). In the third case, you win 100% of the time (barring an intentional decision not to take my money). Options aren't powerful, options + information are powerful.

So the question for determining if options are broken is if they are like the second case (where they have an essentially nonexistent effect) or the third case (where they are overwhelmingly effective). I don't think that the 3e Wizard is in the third case is very compelling. He prepares at the beginning of the day (rather than, say, the beginning of the adventure or during character creation), but in most cases that provides only minimal information. He knows the adventure is "in a crypt", but he doesn't know if that crypt is full of wild animals, mad cultists, mechanical guardians, undead horrors, or demons. So he picks general utility spells, just like a caster with "less options".

And calling out scrolls specifically is weird. They are a much bigger deal for (relatively) weaker classes like the Rogue or Sorcerer than they are the Wizard, as those characters benefit much more from picking up one use of a situational spell.


Fourth the magic item creation rules.
I have no idea what line of logic leads to singling out the magic item rules as broken. Like, at all. I could understand claiming WBL (rather than random treasure) was bad, or that wish interacts with those rules in a broken way, or that custom magic items are abusable, but the magic item creation rules do not seem in any way broken.


Google is your friend (http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=748571).

So after being told that they needed to provide actual evidence, rather than people on forums who are sure that if you did find the evidence, it would go their way... they present people on forums who are sure that if you did find the evidence, it would go their way. I'm done. I no longer see a reason to engage this debate.


You would only make one specific edition a separate benchmark if it wasn't the highest.

No, because if you claim "highest", that's empirical. If WotC says they have the "best sales", that could be false. It could also be true (and if they said it, it would be likely that it was at least defensible), but it could be false. And that's why they didn't say that. Instead, they said it was "on track" to beat 3e. That claim is true regardless of what the numbers look like. You could claim that zero sales were "on track" to beat a billion sales because you expected word of mouth to pick up. They very specifically made a claim that is comparative and empty, so that they could sound like they were winning to the ignorant without having to lie.


And if you don't see why the world being mysterious and magical rather than paint by numbers, all I can say is that you must really like a world so small you can understand everything.

First, yes. The players must be able to understand the world, or they cannot role-play. If you do not know how the world works, and how your character interacts with it, you do not know what your character can do. And if you do not know what you character can do, you cannot answer the fundamental question of role-playing: what would my character do?

Second, having magic be "mysterious" doesn't make it interesting. If magic can do "whatever" then "magic" doesn't exist as a thing. You can't make predictions about whether or not it is possible to do such and such a thing with magic in D&D, you can just say whether or not there is a spell that does it. But in games where magic has a specific and mapped out set of rules, that's not true. For example: Shadowrun. Shadowrun's magic and metaphysics have remained largely unchanged since Bush was president. The first Bush. And as a result, both players and characters can have real and meaningful discussions about whether or not magic can do X or how magic would interact with Y. And while there are disadvantages to that (for example, you can't just throw in a new kind of magic users with previously impossible powers without upsetting the apple cart), it makes magic a real thing in the world. And that is good.


Kill the world-shattering magic and you can have far more depth in what you can do with worldbuilding.

This is clearly false for storytelling in general, but it is also specifically false for RPGs. Because Shadowrun exists, and it can support all those effects (maybe not teleport, but even then mapping teleport onto Shadowrun's metaphysics would mitigate the problems). Shadowrun is a cyberpunk fantasy game set in the science fiction future where people are cybernetically augmented and fight the agents of powerful multi-national corporations while committing acts of crime or terrorism. Starting characters can summon and command spirits, pilot drones, or just be a cybered up badass.

And in that context, those spells don't break anything. planar binding and animate dead are roughly equivalent to summoning or rigging. fabricate is not all that impressive in an industrial society where you can simply buy manufactured goods (and your personal output has no real effect on the market). Even plane shift does very little to break a game that already allows people to take a mulligan on the current setting by virtue of getting on an actual plane and going to Beijing or Nairobi or Paris or almost literally anywhere in the world. AFAIK, there are even actual outer planes for you to visit.

You could give every listed spell to a starting Shadowrun character (barring maybe teleport), and he would not become appreciably more powerful.


And you really think that people in 4e worlds never summon demons? Or raise skeletons?

I think that the list of rituals in the PHB does not cover things like "summon a demon" or "create some skeletons". As such, people in "4e worlds" don't do those things. People in homebrew systems based off 4e might, but that says literally nothing about 4e.


Oh, indeed. But the weakest part of The Avengers is the way they stack up against their opposition. Puny God.

And this is true because? The opposition actually works really well, because it has human-scale mooks (who Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Captain America stack up well against) and giant-size mooks (who Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk stack up well against).


You did notice how that series got worse over time as the characters got more powerful?

I haven't read the books, but the complaints I have heard people make about them are "plot is boring, author wastes time on side characters" not "Rand has too many options to be interesting". Sanderson's wrap-up was, from what I can tell, fairly well received and doesn't (AFAIK) nerf anyone.

But if you don't like The Wheel of Time, you could just pick a different book. Like Lord of Light.


On the contrary. When you have tailor made solutions to problems you render the problems irrelevant. Problems are only problems when you don't have solutions that interact well with them to fix them.

This is fallacious. You're begging the question of whether 3e has "tailor made" solutions to problems.

Total: 4
One Post Record: 4

Because if you're doing your normal "3.X blundered into doing things this way therefore this entirely accidental thing is what was intended all along" then what you're defining as high level was not intended to be played using PCs.

This is an ad hominem.


That sound you just heard was the wooshing noise of the point flying over your head.

This is also an ad hominem.


A statement which makes as much sense as disagreeing that a wizard has more options than a fighter in 3.X. Or possibly you're just unable to separate Watsonian from Doylist solutions.

Ad hominem.


Which is the sort of superficial and wrong analysis I'd expect from you

Ad hominem number four.

ImNotTrevor
2016-03-16, 07:46 PM
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Roland St. Jude
2016-03-16, 08:52 PM
Sheriff: Given the hostility with which this started, it seems like External Baggage. I think we'd rather not have a second thread on the same issues, particularly if it's going to be more hostile than the original.