Bluh bluh D&D

[bensanaz]

Hey, so where can I bitch about D&D game balance given that D&D message boards are full of idiots and assholes? Oh right I have a Livejournal, I can just bitch about any damn thing I feel like.

Comments

[imperatorr]

My main complaint about balancing D&D is that it's too focused on making everything awesomer instead of bringing full casters more in line with the rest of the classes. I know the ways of wizard munchkinnery are varied and multitudinous, but it would probably fix things a lot if they just changed polymorphing, summoning (creation) spells and got rid of anything with the word "shadowcraft" in it.

[bensanaz]

Well, even if you take out all the hardkore sploitz, you come down to the basic problem that spellcasting as a class feature, as it exists in 3E, amounts to "do everything". If you have a character whose class feature is "do everything", either he needs to be so bad at it that it's not fun, or guys who can only do a few things need to be really good at them.

[imperatorr]

Spellcasting has the potential to do everything, but it operates under some limitations: uses per day, different components, etc. There's a lot you can do with that that most people just sort of gloss over, I think. I'm all for making fightery types more potent and interesting, but making them too potent kind of robs the earthiness from the archetype, I think.

[bensanaz]

Well, there's a question of how earthy anyone can be above level 10 or so - by the mid-late levels characters are downright Herculean.

[furikku]

And stuff like this is why I am not a big fan of D&D; it not only is full of confusing-as-fuck rules, but it's also severely limiting as to what sort of character you can play and what they can do. :/

[bensanaz]

You can do a lot of different concepts in D&D, but you end up having to wrassle the rules into getting what you want. For flexibility and relative ease of use I would recommend Mutants & Masterminds, which is intended for superheroes but also works well for fantasy adventure, action-anime, some video game styles, and so on (basically, well, settings where characters have superpowers or might as well have superpowers given the awesome things they do.) The big flaws of Mutants & Masterminds character creation are (1) powergaming is trivially easy, to the point where powergamers don't even bother playing M&M because it's not worth it, and (2) you need to actually have a strong mental image of what you want your character being able to do.

[furikku]

Yeah, I actually bang together a jury-rigged homemade thing when I run. Well, that, and mostly ignore systems at all and just say "Yes that works" or "No try something else." Of course, that's because I've been gaming with the same group for years, so we p. much trust each other mostly.

It seems to me that the systems that allow the most freedom also allow the most powergaming. :/

[bensanaz]

Pretty much. The Mutants & Masterminds approach to it is pretty much to not worry about the risk of overpowered combinations on the basis that players and GMs should have a mutual agreement not to be jerks.

The mutual agreement not to be jerks is an important part of RPGs to me and it baffles me when posters on MBs seem to assume that D&D is about playing with people you hate.