Hot answers tagged balance
38
Take a lesson from real-life windfalls: Investment
First - don't panic! This happens all the time: http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html (read from "You can't trust anyone".)
Give them something to invest in - let them make a down payment on a keep or an airship - something that will really pay off for them in the future.
The Paladin/Cleric should give ...
31
Definitions:
Group: everyone wanting to build a character to a roughly similiar set of requirements.
Everyone: A set of 1 or more players with sufficient system expertise who communicate in some codified way, e.g. through a forum or around a game table.
Thesis:
An option is overpowered if, when presented as a choice, it will always be chosen by members ...
28
I cannot answer as fully as I’d like right now, but for the moment I want to leave you with this:
A DM should not think of himself as having the right of Rule 0, which is why he controls the game.
A DM should instead think of himself as having the responsibility of controling the game, and therefore being given the tool of Rule 0 in order to do so.
...
22
The general consensus seems to be not worth the opportunity cost, save if you build specifically for it.
100 posts talking about this very thing with choice quotes:
Post:
It's dumb as hell, is what's the problem. It assumes combat is conducted on a flat plane and is more or less a straightforward exchange of damage, and the only real difficulty that ...
22
This is a system transition issue, not a creativity issue.
4e is a very different system and that's okay, but it's not for everyone. There's a gap between the player and the system and your job as GM is to help facilitate bridging that gap. Your goal in this should not be to make the player conform to the system, but to help the player understand the ...
21
Yes and no. The limit to Rule 0 is defined entirely by agreement of the people playing the game. If such a limit existed, it would be created by a philosophical limit on the ability for human beings to cooperate to achieve consensus, which would lie somewhere far outside the scope of the roleplaying game they're playing. So in theoretical terms, there is no ...
20
Ancedotes do not make for useful data.
Looking at this well reviewed ranking system:
We see that all of the ToB classes are neatly within Tier 3:
Tier 3: Capable of doing one thing quite well, while still being useful when that one thing is inappropriate, or capable of doing all things, but not as well as classes that specialize in that area. ...
19
If you forgive me, the odds are that this is a perception thing, not a reality thing - unless you own biased dice.
The sane way to determine which is true is test, test, test: take a dice, and roll it a thousand times. Keep a tally of how many times you roll each number.
That will do one of two things:
Most likely, it shows that there is no substantial ...
19
GM guides have long advocated solutions like bandits, tax collectors, and runaway inflation, but they rarely work out well in practice. Partly that's because those solutions have unintended consequences like vigilanteism, tax evasion, and bookkeeping headaches. The bigger problem is that players are sensitive to loss, and they react very poorly to losses ...
18
You Can't
Strictly speaking, you can't balance them at all in advance, since the players could not only fight them in any order, but could conceivably fight any number of other things in any order, meaning they could be any level at all when they reach any given angel.
You should build a template for each angel with each of its powers in advance, and ...
17
I'm assuming that by "big huge robots" you're talking about Gundam/Mech -style "I'm bigger than a house!" robots, as opposed to "powered-armor" a la Starship Troopers (although there's some overlap between the two).
The first thing you need to decide, is what you want the focus of your game to be. I can think of a few examples:
Focus on in-mech ...
17
Outside of Combat
If the characters have different skill-sets (i.e., there's one mage, one cleric, one thief, and one fighter in the group), then you can tailor your non-combat encounters to scale to the skills that are in play. Somebody brought a master thief? Then the locks and traps are suddenly masterwork. Only a first-level thief? Then the locks and ...
17
Let me chip in with the blue collar guy's answer to this question, drawn from experience not theory.
A rules option, character, gear, or other game element is "overpowered" if it gives you significantly more effectiveness than most other options in a way that impacts the fun of the game for its participants. As @Soulrift points out, the implication is that ...
17
Keep on the Shadowfell is balanced for parties of 5 players
The default party size for 4e is 5 players, and all the official modules are designed to be an appropriate challenge for a party of 5. This is not to say that the game won't work well with 3 players (my experience has been that it starts having trouble when you have 2 or less players or 8+ ...
16
Yes, there are rules on this. However, they are contradictory.
Page 42 of the 3.5 DMG (Making a New Character) suggests a per-item limit of one-half the character's total wealth.
As a general rule, a new character can spend no more than half her total wealth on a single item, and no more than one quarter the total wealth on consumables such as ...
16
The most straightforward answer I can give you is: have them gain less treasure during the next encounters, until you reach the intended balance.
In games where XP and money (or their equivalents) are independent, it's fairly easy. The PCs are now over-equipped, so they could also be able to handle some higher level fights for bigger XP awards. While ...
15
Necessary but insufficient
It would help. It would more than help; I have a hard time imagining them being functional without it. The necklace of natural attacks or scorpion kama are generally necessary for Monks. That said, the necklace of natural attacks does exist (as do similar items in Pathfinder), and it’s not nearly enough to make the Monks ...
15
I once had a Shadowrun group who hit a truck transporting gold, and they walked away with something like two million nuyen (each) in a campaign where that was more than they had combined through character creation and their careers.
It was somewhat of a mess, but it counteracted itself nicely, because I didn't just let them spend it on anything they could ...
14
There are several major mecha oriented RPG systems. The ones that may fit what you're looking for best are from Dream Pod 9 - their Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles lines (both based on the Silhouette ruleset, which I played in a campaign under). Mechs are 12-18 feet tall, more mobile than but weapons not as powerful as a main battle tank. The ruleset ...
14
Vow of Poverty, even if it required no feats and was merely an option freely available to your character, would still take away more than it grants. You can literally buy very-nearly everything Vow of Poverty has to offer, and have hundreds of thousands of gold pieces left over. The only things it has that are legitimately difficult to get are the ability ...
13
My personal recommendation is to use a dice roller. If you have an iPhone, I recommend Dicenomicon ($5), dynamicDICE ($1) or Dice Bag (free). I have heard that Pip ($1) is also pretty good. I have found that the luck associated with physically rolling dice is dissociated from digitally rolling them.
If you find that you still think that a dice roller is ...
13
It’s better than a +1 greatsword but a lot weaker than a +1 aberration-bane greatsword (which is a +2 equivalent). It’s probably worth around 4,000 gp, which is quite a lot for level 2. On the other hand, Aberrations typically have supernatural defenses that martial types will have a very hard time dealing with. Magic items are the way you allow ...
12
Ask him nicely, make him an NPC/GM, and if those two things don't work, ask him to leave
This isn't an in-game problem. This is a player problem. The first approach is "I commend you on your ingenuity, but your current player is making the game less fun for everyone. Shall we work on a way of making him an NPC (that you can play on occasion) but statting up ...
12
There are a few mitigating aspects which have limited the Edge's use for the player who has it in my game, which is Deadlands Reloaded.
Firstly, Gadgeteer with RAW is limited to powers of the character's rank or lower that are available to Mad Scientists. This actually reduces the number of powers available significantly.
Also remember that the device ...
12
The wording of the DMG sections on treasure make it very clear that RAW here are fast and loose, and there's no set way to handle this. Practical experience in the game makes it clear that proper magic item distribution is crucial to balance, though, so it is important to have some way to handle this - it's just up to you what approach you choose. There are ...
12
Look for an Existing Solution, and Respec/Educate
Here's the example Xivort power discussed in the question:
Net (weapon) At-Will DDI
Attack: Area burst 1 within 5 (creatures in the burst); +5 vs. Reflex
Hit: The target is restrained (save ends).
Here is a abridged similar feat (there are several):
Net SnareDDI
You catch an enemy in ...
12
Turn the gold from asset to liability.
Do not let them spend it in the first place. Perhaps they stay for a few more weeks in the dungeon/desert/swamp. And carrying the gold will be such a huge burden, especially if you have to choose between carrying your food and water rations or the gold. So perhaps they decide to hide it somewhere, to be collected later ...
10
Add one standard monster (or 4 minions) to every encounter.
This will give you the right XP by the book to add to the encounter in order to account for the additional player.
I would recommend adding monsters from the following groups:
minions (If the party has a couple AoE's, adding more than 4 should be OK). When in doubt add minions, particularly ...
10
Generally I try to define, with my players, what "broken" really means. If everyone in the party goes with a fairly optimized build my PCs may be more powerful than average, but it isn't hard to create a positive roleplaying experience by simply writing stories that put them up against more powerful antagonists.
Usually though, there are a few abilities ...
10
In 4E the four defenses are calculated via 10 + bonuses, whereas the attack is d20 + bonuses. This means that in average the attack roll is 10,5 + bonuses.
If you change this to attack score = 11 + bonuses and defense check = d20 + bonuses, you raise both the attack value and the defense value by 0,5 in average. So this is the preferred way, if you don't ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
