rogueknight333 wrote...
The point was simply that rogues are not exactly rendered useless just because SA is taken off the table, and so are not really in quite the same situation as a WPM, who apart from generating more crits cannot do much that some other class cannot do as well or better.
Hmm.
While I'd agree that rogues do have some other tricks like UMDing stuff (though this typically gets less and less powerful as levels go up), traps, and (at epic levels) better survivability, I'd argue that WMs suffer less from crit immunity. Worst case a weapon master loses about 50% of his damage but still has sky high AB - he basically becomes a fighter with more AB and slightly less feats.
A level 40 rogue, on the other hand, loses probably 84 damage per hit. If we assume he's using a sword short with +5 enhancement and 2d6 bonus damage, that'd be roughly 16ish damage per hit (can quibble about the exact number, not important). Which means he's going from 100 damage per hit to 16, or doing 16.7% damage. Even if you upped his base damage per hit to 25, that's still 25/109 = 23% of his former damage. He's being hit over twice as hard in the damage department as the WM, and the WM will manage just fine if a fighter can manage.
Similar logic holds for all levels, not just 40.
Obviously if supplies AREN'T limited and the rogue has 500 scrolls of IGMS or 200 epic traps he might relatively better off than the WM. But if they're trying to conserve supplies...
rogueknight333 wrote...
Also I suspect one of the reasons crit immunity is often given to enemies meant to be especially powerful is to keep them from being taken out with embarrassing speed by certain characters (not necessarily the best means of handling that particular issue, but at least slightly more intelligent than you were implying).
Possibly, but who does it so drastically affect besides SA and WM builds? Said creatures are often taken out with embarrassing speed by casters regardless.
That's more rhetorical to be clear, not claiming you endorse that strategy.
rogueknight333 wrote...
True, most do not (though something like it might occasionally emerge accidentally), but then most modules hardly seem to address problems of balance, at least in any very well thought out way, at all (not always unreasonably, as they may be focused on other aspects of gameplay).
True enough. A story heavy mod solely focused on dialogue and such might not care about combat (just like Siege is not exactly concerned with gut-wrenching moral quandaries or a plot that's impacted by the decisions players made).
rogueknight333 wrote...
It does not seem obviously harder, however, than trying to make sure each and every individual encounter has been satisfactorily balanced (unless you just make all of them really easy, which to be sure is a solution many module builders have embraced).
Perhaps, though if you can figure out a rough "template" it can be applied to encounters in general with tweaks depending on the situation. Making individual encounters balanced also becomes easier with some mechanic modifications since the default ruleset is not even remotely balanced for single player stuff (though to be fair, it wasn't meant to be).
I think a large part of the problem is the sheer deviation available. For example, to be very simplistic, let's imagine we have a fighter who does 20 damage per hit and 200 HP. We can balance combat based around this and make something challenging and engaging.
Now image we throw in two more fighter builds that have 10 damage/400 HP and 40 damage/100 HP respectively. Suddenly coming up with something that's about the same challenge for each is very hard. On the other hand, imagine that the two new fighter builds had 18 damage/220 HP and 22 damage/180 HP. You can use the original encounter and still have something reasonable for all three.
I don't think everything should be the same, but I think a game that has players with ABs and ACs with a deviation of over 20 on a d20 system is somewhat messed up.
rogueknight333 wrote...
I would think there would be more ways to deal with problems like that than simply doing away with a lot of special immunities (if that is in fact what Blizzard did, which is not completely clear from what you say).
They stopped making monsters immune to a specific type of damage and made all monsters vulnerable to bleed/poison effects. That was basically it.
rogueknight333 wrote...
Things like providing multiple enemies with different powers so that a character weak against one could deal with others (which might even make channeling monsters to the teammate best equipped to deal with them part of the strategy), or giving characters powers that while sometimes weak on their own could synergistically combine with those of other classes to provide additional benefits, or just making more versatile classes with more tricks in their repertoires.
You can do this without making monsters immune to a specific type of damage, though. Blizzard's often done things like make some mobs immune to physical damage and others immune to spells or created situations where certain classes can do slightly better.
Always having to do this kind of thing also severely limits encounter design, especially since Blizzard doesn't want to force every group to have X class to do Y content. classes have different tricks that let them "break the rules" in an encounter - but in a way that makes it slightly easier, not in a way that trivializes it.
rogueknight333 wrote...
Perhaps, but I am suspicious of the argument that if it works for MMOs it will work in other contexts
Not what I'm saying. For example, the idea of re-running a dungeon a bunch of times for boss drops makes little to no sense in a single player game. Or the idea of the game not really beginning until max level.
However, if an MMO decides to remove a "staple" of RPGs (fire elementals being immune to fire) because it horribly messes up balance and causes severe problems - it's probably worth considering whether having fire elementals be immune to fire is worth doing in your game. If it adds some tactical depth and players can adapt, feel free.
But if you look at NWN, there are mainly just two cold spells - Ice Storm at level 4 and Cone of Cold at level 5. Unless you take meta-magic, you have no other way to deliver cold damage - contrast that to Combust, Fireball, Firebrand, Delayed Blast Fireball, Incendiary Cloud, and Meteor Swarm.
It's even worse if you consider a foe weak to acid - Mestil's Acid Breath (level 3) and Acid Fog (level 6). I realize that DnD has far more spells than NWN, but my point is that if you want to want to force players to adapt to immunities and expect them to exploit vulnerabilities, you need to make sure they have the means to actually do so.
On another note, players tend to want the easiest path (within reason). If you have two fighters, where one uses a sword and the other uses an axe, and the only difference is that the sword-using fighter does twice the damage - how many people do you think would pick the axe-wielder? There might be a few who go with the inferior option because they think it looks cooler or they want the challenge - but that would be very, very few people.
The Mass Effect series has an interesting example of this. By default, the general "roles" are combat, techonolgy, and biotics (space magic). There are six classes: soldier (pure combat), vangard (combat/biotics), infiltrator (combat/tech), adept (pure biotics), engineer (pure tech), and sentinel (biotics/tech). In Mass Effect 1, biotics were incredibly strong. In Mass Effect 2, Bioware tried to tone them down but overshot the mark, resulting is basically no one playing the adept class. The class practically might as well have not existed for most people because it was so weak (still playable, but much weaker). When the playerbase pretty universally ignores a class because you made it weaker than the others, you have an issue. Even in a single player game.
Edit: forget the chess thing, I think I get what you're saying and delving too much into the analogy doesn't really do much.
Modifié par MagicalMaster, 12 avril 2013 - 04:36 .
