57 réponses à ce sujet

[MagicalMaster]

Squatting Monk wrote...

That's totally not what he said. Besides, HG has added tons of new content, not pared the game down to bare bones.

WebShaman wrote...

As noted above, this is not what I said. I find it relatively irritating that you have a habit of posting such overblown text - a number of forum members have mentioned such directly to you, both in the present and in the past. Please refrain from doing such again in the future.

Keep in mind I've mentioned being interested in building a PvM (using your terminology to distinguish from PvE) world myself if I manage to find the time.  And I've played on both HG and The Awakening.  My question was a sincere and fairly straightforward one.  It was not an attempt to disparage HG or TA (unless you think I'm trying to call myself stupid for being interested in building a world on the same general idea).

WebShaman described what he thought the idea of roles and parties in DnD should be and how these went beyond pure combat (he used the idea of a fighter in a drinking game, for example).  Servers built along the lines of HG and TA don't have drinking games factor in as a major part.  Many don't even have traps/locks as a major part due to various reasons, let alone something like general utility spells for casters that are unrelated to combat but still vitally important.

In short, that type of server (and again, the type of server I've been thinking about building and have put some mechanics work into - plus the testing server that I put up for people to mess around in if they desired earlier in the thread) seems to be the antithesis of what Webshaman thinks DnD should be as far as I can tell.

To quote him...

"Trying to turn the D&D rules into a DPS style game is IMHO really a no-go. You are cutting out most of what I consider the fun of playing.  It is why most NWN PWs that are purely PG based normally have such huge balancing problems - because the roles being evaluated DPS-wise were never construed to be done so in such a manner."

Is asking whether he thinks such PWs are basically a fruitless endeavor and kind of pointless to make with the NWN engine such a crazy thing given his statements?

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 23 janvier 2013 - 06:55 .

[MagicalMaster]

Squatting Monk wrote...

Why is this a problem, exactly? Doesn't it mean that death magic is not a "win" button? That players will tend to gravitate towards more reliable damage sources?

It depends.  RNG favors the underdog.

In other words, if you can easily beat the encounter with reliable damage, then you'll probably use reliable damage.

However, let's say you keep wiping on the encounter and can't ever get past 90% of the way through, you know you'll never win with reliable damage without major improvement in play and/or gear.  On the flip side, Death Magic gives you a (small) chance to win as opposed to no chance to win.  In that situation, players will start spamming Death Magic since it's the only way they can beat something that they otherwise cannot beat.

WebShaman wrote...

I personally, after literally a decade or more of play, think that NWN is really not a good base for a PvM (PG) style computer game. Many of the reasons I have outlined above, and I am sure that FS could lay down textwalls of more reasons here. Put simply, the NWN Aurora Engine is not designed or optimized for such, and the ruleset is also not designed or optimized for such. The only reason that it has been used to do it, is because of the Toolset, IMHO.

NWN is perhaps one of the easiest computer games to mod due to the Toolset and the enormous amount of CC created by the Community. It is so easy, that just about every person can do it - something that seperates it from just about any other available toolset computer game out there.

I rather suspect that if DA had delivered such a toolset, we would not be having this discussion...or imagine if WoW had such a toolset...

Fair enough.  And yes, I'd have loved the opportunity to use the WoW engine for designing content - but that's not available and the next best thing seems to be NWN, with all of its issues and faults.  Which is why I still care about the game and still fiddle with the toolset when I have the time.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 24 janvier 2013 - 05:43 .

[FunkySwerve]

[quote]MagicalMaster wrote...

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

No, I was talking about the races themselves, which are critical in a properly balanced PW. Sure, many of them have general characteristics, but if you look back you'll see I mentioned class abilities (like turning and defoliate) which specifically target by race. It's just one of myriad creature characteristics which an absolutely homogenous approach destroys.[/quote]

Let me get this straight: you're arguing that a PW cannot be balanced unless there are different races with spells/abilities that specifically target different races?[/quote]
Nope. You're going to have to make some effort to understand me if you want me to spend time responding to you. I think WS already explained the gist of my remarks to you, but to restate it in an even simpler way: having opponents of varied racial types is critical to a properly balanced PW. What is 'properly' balanced? Balanced in such a fashion that the abilities characters of each class are given access to are actually useful. Obviously, you're never going to get every ability perfectly balanced, but that's the goal, and failure to include a variety of racial types wipes out a decent chunk of core capabilities - think Ranger favored enemies, healing spells, negative damage, death magic, turning, etc etc. Can you omit these without going completely homogenous? Of course, but you'll have a lot of broken game mechanincs as a result.

[quote]

Not particularly (on the reframing).

I'm suggesting an approach that advocates trying to make all playstyles (or as many as possible) effective in every situation.  This doesn't mean all playstyles have the exact same stats and abilities, simply that the net effect is to have them all roughly equal in every situation.

You're suggesting deliberately making some playstyles drastically more effective in some situations than others.
[/quote]

I think your confusion stems from your continued determination to conceive of this as an either/or dichotomy, rather than a sliding scale. I'm not advocating just making playstyles vary in efficacy, but also builds. And I'm not just advocating it, but telling you that you MUST allow for this, to the extent that you want both meaningfully different playstyles, builds, and opponents.


[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Ouch.  My wounded ego.

For those unaware, the Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that incompetent people are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence, thus they believe they are better than they actually are (roughly stated for the part of the effect relevant to Funky's comment).[/quote]
Actually, the corollary is relevant as well - that more competent people actually tend to underestimate their competence, suggesting a link between the capacity for being self-critical and competence, as well.

[quote]
So let's talk competence!

I can mathematically prove that the raiding guild (group PvE content) I run in WoW is in the top 2% of raiding guilds (and that's on two nights a week, versus 3-4+ nights for our competitors).  Furthermore, Blizzard has stated that something like only 10% of the playerbase even does organized raids.  That would put me roughly in the top 0.2% of the WoW population for PvE ability.  Even if we assume we're off by as much as a factor of five for whatever reason, that still puts me in the top 1%.  I have played at this level for something like five years in an extremely competitive environment and often ranked in the top 200 players of my spec (out of something probably like 250,000 players of said spec).

Does this make me a balance guru?  Of course not.  But it does mean that I can testify to the effects of different balancing methods in a competitive environment where it matters.  I have seen the effects in WoW when it was more like the ideal you describe (back in Vanilla and Burning Crusade).  I can tell you how competitive players will react to certain mechanics and situations.
[/quote]
The skillsets required for being a skilled player in WoW (or indeed any game) and for being a skilled game developer have very little overlap. Further, it's not clear how being good at WoW qualifies you to 'testify to the effects of different balancing methods' when, by your own argument, WoW only applies one of those methods. This seems irrelevant at best, when we could compare our relative degree of experience in balancing the actual game under discussion...but you don't want to go there, do you?

[quote]
And I never claimed you had no regard for balance.  I claimed you've never been in an environment where balance truly matters.  If nothing is sufficiently hard and/or there's no competition to speak of, then balance is far less important and imbalance has far fewer adverse effects (and you're free to do more "interesting" things).
[/quote]
This bit here is why I whipped out the nooblet/DK remarks to begin with. To paraphrase, you don't think I don't care about balance, you just think I have no idea what it is. Potato, potato. You are a very silly person. And by that, I don't mean that you're silly, only that you have no idea what being serious is, because you've never been in an environment where seriousness matters.


[quote]

http://tvtropes.org/...yDifferentSides

Warcraft I and II

Total Annihilation

Dark Colony

There's three (four if you count both Warcrafts) RTSes right there.
[/quote]
I've actually played all of those, though I have no recollection what the mobs are like in Dark Colony. I can tell you for a fact that in neither Total Annihilation nor Warcraft I-II are the mobs completely homogenous. If they were, the research needed to obtain most of them would never get done. The trope you're referring to is also familiar to me, and is a mockery of the position you're advocating - largely homogenous characters and enemies. As that site points out, sure, some units of opposed sides are identical, but that doesn't make the sides identical. By the way, I DID think of a game, though it's not really in the same genre. Chess. Oh, and checkers. Parcheesi. Othello. But if I have to explain to you why those are inopposite, there's not much point to my posting replies to you. You have to go radically out-of-genre to find homogeneity. Football! Soccer! Ok, ok, I'll stop poking fun.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Actually, yes, homogenization, to the extent you practice it, DOES mean things have to be exactly the same. Anything else is a step along that sliding scale towards what you are characterizating as RPS.[/quote]

Not really.  Let's say we have class A and class B.p.[/quote]

Yes, really. To the extent that you practice complete homogeneity, YOU DON'T HAVE class A or class B. Is that sliding scale coming any clearer? Any other use of 'homogeneity' doesn't logically cohere.

[quote]
I'm only taking a step along your sliding scale to the extent that I think classes should exist.
[/quote]
Bingo! But, if you want them all to be equally effective against all enemies as you advocate, they might as well NOT exist. They are, in that case 'cosmetically different'.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

I'm going to skip quoting most of this in the interest of brevity. To summarize, you point out that their run logs show a pretty low deviation in dps for the varying roles - you say 11% from the average. To achieve that number, you begin by throwing out the lowest 6 DPS roles, admitting their failure in terms of balance:[/quote]

Not quite, because you apparently ignored the whole point about longsword versus bastard sword.  Let's look at Arms versus Fury (warrior DPS specializations).  Let's say Fury is 4% above the average and Arms is 2% above the average.  No serious warrior is going to play Arms unlike there's some fight specific mechanic that favors it or unless he's just messing around.  However, Arms is still well within that 11% deviation in theory.  In practice, because the best players play Fury, Arms has lower parsed numbers and looks worse than it actually is.

Get the idea?
[/quote]
I 'get' that more skilled players focusing on certain builds will skew outcomes, but you fail to explain the relevance of that to the larger point. The skilled players are flocking to those abilities for a reason, after all - the large deviations are not due simply to said flocking. When skilled players can disagree, you've hit a reasonable balance. Of course, that's not as likely to happen if you rely on oversimplified metrics.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

An unused class (or, by contrast, an overused class) is definitionally an imbalanced class. The unused ones might as well not be in the game, for our purposes, and the overused ones will quickly be exploited until nerfed. At this point I am left to wonder why it is you're holding up WoW as an example of 'balance.' [/quote]

None of those are unused classes.  They're "unused" damage specializations in classes that have two or more damage specializations.  Blizzard will never be able to get all damage specializations within a class perfectly identical (because the specializations are not identical), which means people will typically favor whichever specialization is the highest at the moment, even if it's by half a percent.[/quote]
Whether you call them 'classes' or 'specializations' is a purely semantic disagreement, which does nothing to answer the issue I raised - if they're not played, they're definitionally imbalanced, whatever you choose to call them. I.e., not properly balanced.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Anyway, to continue my summary, you then assume a certain range of AB without any explanation, and even more inexplicably assign a point of AB a value of 8.5% deviation. To be clear, when I say 'inexplicably', I do not mean that I don't understand, only that you're doing so without any explained basis.[/quote]

First, I assumed a range of AB where adding 1 AB would make a difference (because the AB isn't 20 or more lower than AC) and where the AB was not superior to the AC.  Do you object to either of those conditions (and if you do, I'm guessing you might wish to allow AB to be superior to AC)?

Second, I didn't assign an AB a value of 8.5%.  I said...

"a single point of AB is worth between 8.3% more hits and 40% more hits for a non-dual-wielder (more if we factor in Epic Dodge).  If we average those numbers, we wind up with roughly 24%.  But let's say we think that's on the high side, so we'll divide the number in half again, which gives us 12% (an AB of AC - 11 gives a 14% bonus, as a basis of comparison)."

I assumed you were sufficiently talented at basic math to understand how I got the 8.3% and 40% figures and you've claimed to have understood what I did.  Why, then, are you objecting to me not explaining said math?
[/quote]
Seriously? Ho boy...where to begin. First of all, flat difference between base ab and ac doesn't just matter in the range of plus or minus twenty, because of attack iterations, which bring each successive attack at a lower value. Second, you have mechanics like epic dodge, which throw a wrench in the works. Third, you arrive at your figures by assuming an average of the ranges - effecively assuming one armor class. You can't actually know what delta hit % an increase or decrease in ab will have unless you know the actual acs. Fourth, you cut out the portion of my response to you where I explained that you were attempting to compare apples to oranges, likening a single point of ab to nearly the entire range of DPS deviation you were talking about. You claimed that:
[quote]
gaining or losing 1 AB in NWN is more of a difference than the difference in damage output for the top 15 (out of 23) damage specializations in WoW. [/quote]
This just isn't the case, because even IF we know the relevant ACs, and can calculate an effective delta hitrate per point of ab, ab vs ac is NOT the only determinant of DPS - some hits won't deal damage due to resistance, immunity, or soak, and some 'hits' won't even land due to concealment or miss chance. Your 'analysis' is clownishly oversimplified, and arrives at a conclusion that is plain-on-its face wrong to anyone who's actually logged nwn.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Of course, that doesn't speak to the even larger problem with your thesis: the notion that DPS is the only relevant determinant in what makes a build (or, in your parlance, a role) fun/rewarding to play, or able to contribute meaningfully.[/quote]

I don't think it's the only relevant determinant.  At a minimum you'll note I've mentioned the idea of tanking and healing in addition to damage.  Things such crowd control and interrupts (like failing a concentration casting check due to the opponent using an ability without actually causing damage) also exist but don't form entire roles in and of themselves - in fact, those tend to be handled by damage roles.

In other words, sometimes DPSers just deal damage (and avoid bad stuff on a fight).  Sometimes they deal damage and have to crowd control.  Sometimes they deal damage, have to crowd control, and interrupt abilities.  Sometimes they have to do all of these and handle additional fight specific mechanics.  It can be any combination of these things.
[/quote]
Sure, you mention other roles, but you don't include them in your metric - you know, the one you use to 'prove' that NWN is inherently imbalanced as compared to WoW.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Furthermore, if you look at that log, you'll see that the direct link between dps and ab you're trying to forge simply doesn't hold up, because of a variety of other gameplay mechanics like concealment and concealment penetration.[/quote]

Why?

Given otherwise identical builds with the difference that one has 1 more AB (and the other has 1 more Fort or something), concealment should affect both equally (assuming no Epic Dodge, which punishes the lower AB build more).[/quote]
Because you can't assume otherwise identical builds. You're trying to establish a unitary value for AB to convert it to DPS, which must account for, not disregard, all other mechanics. Otherwise, you might as well assume 'otherwise identical' ACs for all enemies - you're not going to reach an comparitively useful value. It's true that, all other things being equal, 50% conceal is going to to affect DPS of both builds equally, but all other things aren't necessarily equal - as I said, there are other mechanics that determine ability to hit. Does the build have blind fight? What about immunity to miss chance? And in HG, what about listen, which reduces the effects of conceal still further? And that doesn't even touch on other concerns, like percentage of crits, and crit confirmation rolls, all of which bear on final DPS.

If all that is too much for you to grapple with, just looked at the log I linked - like I said last time. You can easily see that not only does your putative 8.5% not hold up, a direct correlation between ab and dps doesn't hold up:

ab // damage // dps  (runtime 196 minutes = 11760 seconds)

106 // 161299 // 13.7
104 // 111730 // 9.5
104 // 86744  // 7.37
100 // 136440 // 11.6
98  // 135619 // 11.5
96  // 38741  // 3.2

Rocket science, this ain't.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Further, the exceedingly high dps of the sorc is NOT matched by a high number of kills - he was doing a lot of spead damage.[/quote]

What does number of kills have to do with anything?  Is that considered important on Higher Ground or something?  Do people literally compete to try to finish mobs off for some reason?
[/quote]
Lolz. As compared to what? 'Literally competing' to do more DPS? It's another way of measuring build efficacy - obviously. Death magic doesn't deal damage (though it's convertable, it's not logged that way, making it useless according to DPS log parsing), and DPS doesn't reflect target difficulty, and in fact often reflects the opposite, since more difficult foes often have more immunes and resists. And that's just scraping the surface of what DPS doesn't cover - like healing, which is why many loggers also track rezzes (healing) and damage taken/absorbed (tanking). And all sorts of other things, too, like damage 'quality' - are you flailing away at trash mobs when your party mates are slugging it out with more resistant, but more threatening mobs?

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

This obsession with DPS as the sole determinant of build/role success is a frequent source of bemoaning by our more veteran players. It's a real failing of WoW's balancing.[/quote]

It's an obsession for players who are performing the role of being the primary damage dealers.  Furthermore, the obsession is about equal opportunity - the idea that a rogue shouldn't be brought over a warrior for DPS solely because rogues are better at damage (or vice versa).
[/quote]
No, I called it an obsession because less-experienced players on our server tend to look at bald DPS to the exclusion of other factors, just as you are doing. This causes them to do things that are less-than-optimal for themselves and their party, like hacking away at 'trash' mobs that spellcasters can easily dispense with via instakill, instead of focusing on mobs that their build is more suited to dealing with. In extreme cases, they'll even slap on extreme amounts of damage immunity to a narrow spectrum and swing at damage feedback critters, racking up massive amounts of instantly-healed 'damage', while killing their party mates (that particular behavior produced some very amusing forum posts, until people started adjusting their logger programs).

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Of course, WoW is pretty far from a paragon of balance, as they pretty much throw out all their old content's challenge when they introduce their next expansion.[/quote]

What does this have to do with anything?
[/quote]
The point of balancing, as you yourself acknowledged above, is to produce challenging play. WoW tosses a great deal of challenging play out the window on every expansion in favor of number inflation, to appease the kids. It's a feasible approach if you have the zots, but not one that cares a great deal about balance.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Totally with you on that one - I would redo NWN with the Rolemaster system, given the opportunity (it's d100 based, not d20, far more granular). I'll come back to this at the end, since I think we might actually get somewhere with it.[/quote]

Being able to use something larger than a d20 would help, but not solely because of granularity (which is an important issue).  A d20 simply can't handle a gap of 30 points between AB and AC, for example.  And higher level/higher magic worlds tend to get very large AB/AC/save gaps between different builds.
[/quote]
That's another way of describing the lack of granularity at the top and bottom of the range.

Funky

[FunkySwerve]

FunkySwerve wrote...

No, this misses the point again. This is only a problem if you assume a single homogenous enemy type. So long as you provide players a variety of types concurrently, you can ensure than each role has something to contribute. Yes, it's far more complicated to do so, but the play is much more rewarding as a result.

In other words, you can't have a single boss mob with interesting abilities?  You always have to have mobs with X, Y, and Z weaknesses to ensure everyone has something to do?  Isn't that more limiting?  Doesn't that give you less freedom to make interesting encounters?

No. In other words, your 'problem' is only a problem if you assume that all enemies are the same. This is a dumb assumption to make, as it is specifically what I am arguing against doing. My approach gives much more, not less, freedom to make interesting encounters.

Designing areas that are almost impossible to beat is a lot harder.  Areas that push you to the limits of your playing skill and character build, that demand solid planning and precise execution.  That's what I enjoy (both playing and trying to build them).

If you're just looking for a happy medium of difficulty, then balance is kind of irrelevant.  One character being 20% better than another (for whatever reason and however you define being better in this case) doesn't matter if you only need to perform at 50% of character potential regardless.

Actually, I regard the former as a 'happy medium', for that very reason.

FunkySwerve wrote...

Again, this is a straw man problem, since you're assuming a single foe. There's no reason to limit yourself in this way, and this is one major reason our boss spawns are seldom alone. Even then, there's no reason that certain classes are totally barred from participating, because we don't balance our builds as one-trick ponies - you'll recall my mention of this earlier. Hence, that rogue, even if he were barred from effective use of poison, would have other fallback abilities. They wouldn't, necessarily, be as efficacious, but there's nothing preventing them from falling within whatever delta of efficacy you decide is appropriate - 11%, or otherwise, if you want to limit yourself to a consideration of a simple metric like DPS.

How in the world is this a straw man problem?  I'm not assuming anything, I am telling you what I saw.  I am describing actual events and consequences, not hypotheticals.

 You're positing a systemic problem with my approach based on a single example? That's comically poor inductive reasoning, if so, but that's not at all how what you wrote read. Let's revisit it:

    Let's take four players with classes A, B, C, and D respectively.  If there are four bosses, and only A can harm the first, only B can harm the second, only C can harm the third, and only D can harm the fourth, you might argue that's balance since all are "useful."  But what actually happens is that you bring four of class A to boss one, four of class B to boss two, four of class C to boss three, and four of class D to boss four.

You're using this scenario to advance the notion that all classes should be equally useful against all bosses, yes? You are assuming a single character going up against a single boss, in each example. Whether or not you've actually seen that happen isn't relevant, as it's not the style of play which you're taking issue with - namely, mine. There's absolutely no reason to pit a single boss against a single player, unless you're designing a single player mod. We simply don't do that, because it DOES require incredibly dull bosses and characters to pull off. That's why, for example, many popular SP mods introduce ancillary abilities that EVERY character gets regardless of class - as do the OCs. They blur class distinctions specifically to avoid catastrophic boss/player mismatch. In MP, however, this is totally unnecessary, and any argument that assumes this approach in MP is fundamentally flawed for that reason.

So you're arguing that you should provide rogues with abilities that somehow cannot be used simultaneously with poison but which act as a fallback on a poison immune foe, as an example?  And that the difference between using these fallback abilities and poison should be minimal?

I wouldn't say minimal, but until you grasp the core of what I'm trying to explain to you, there's no reason to dwell on the nitty gritty. You must crawl before you can run, grasshoppah.

P.S.  3:15 AM here, need to finish this tomorrow.  Been travelling all day and had to lead a WoW raid tonight.

Seriously? Three posts to reply to one (and interwoven with other replies)? Sigh. It'd be a lot simpler for both of us if you'd just post one response, when you finsh it, but what the heck.

Funky

[FunkySwerve]

[quote]MagicalMaster wrote...

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Aww shucks, I had such hope for a second. You're still assuming a unitary foe, however, as well as some extreme one-trick ponies.[/quote]

How many tricks to harm enemies does a melee type have besides hitting it with a weapon?  Are you assuming they're UMDing scrolls and this is effective or something?
[/quote]
I wasn't just talking about melee types, there, but classes in general, and I also wasn't just talking about DPS. My point was focused on your flawed assumptions, rather than particulars - see the above replies.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

I'm simply telling you that in practice, there are ways around these problems that are far more interesting than resort to homogenization.[/quote]

Like?  Let's look at the simple example of a pure fighter versus a weapon master (weapon master is more crit dependent and has far more AB).  Versus a non-crit immune enemy, you've theoretically achieved some balance in which the fighter and weapon master can contribute equally in their own way.  Now make them crit immune because they're undead.  The fighter lost far less.

You could do something like make them crit immune but jack up their AC to make it so the fighter misses far more but the weapon master isn't effective, I suppose.  However, what is the point of that?  It's something completely passive that doesn't change playstyle.  You don't react any differently to it.
[/quote]
That's actually a pretty good example to pick. With WM, the putative offsetting balance is the loss of weapon diversity for the gain of ab and damage with a given weapon. If you find that your WMs are overpowered vis a vis other melee classes, you must then reduce that benefit, increase the offsetting loss, add an additional offsetting loss, or add additional benefits to other melee classes. We took a mixed approach to this. Most critically, we made different weapon damage types matter, by making different foes have different amounts of resist annd immunity to physical types, so that WMs were of little use against maybe a one-thirds of enemies, and of reduced efficacy against another third. Of course, some players opted to take a second specialization to offset this loss, but did so at a cost in feats that many found unpalatable in terms of defense.

That, of course, raises a second point - if a class is very strong in offense, you can offset that with defensive weakness. For a long time, our WMs had no real access to crit immunity, though we eventually got the balance close enough that we could give them a limited crit immunity ability, albeit one of the most limited. And we gave our fighters, since you mention them specifically, epic dodge automatically, as well as other benefits, including a bunch of added feats, making their strong point - additional feats - stronger still. Specifically, feats taken from NWN2, which affect crit confirmation rolls.

Of course, there are plenty of other things you can do as well, depending on the current state of affairs on your server.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Lolz. Cute, and typical of a WoW player. You completely missed the second point I was making about role variety - considering other things besides DPS.[/quote]

Hardly.  There's only so many defensive spells/utility spells/summoning spells/CC spells that are needed.  Once you've done all of those that are required, you're left with four options.

1, try to physically attack something (bad idea in general)
2, stand there doing nothing
3, damage spam
4, death magic

Even if you argue that a single mage in a group will be entirely busy dispelling/CCing/summoning and won't have any free time...what if there are two mages?  If the first mage can handle all of the non-damage/death magic stuff by himself, then the second mage just has damage/death magic.  If it takes two mages to handle it, then what if you add a third caster?  To rephrase, if you need X casters to achieve the non-DPS/death magic requires, then what does the X+1th caster do?

In the end, fights boil down to making the enemy's HP hit zero before yours.  It eventually comes down to damage in the end that needs to be delivered from some source.
[/quote]
You pretty much proved my point there. You're overlooking a lot of other roles, like disabling, healing, buffing, summoning, and tactical support. I could go on at length about each, but I'm getting the impression that you're more interested in arguing with me than learning anything. Curiously, you even overlook tanking, either via spell or summon, which can be critical to party DPS - it's very hard to deal damage if you're eating dirt.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

You just answered your own question. There's no reason to assume a unitary mob. Our runs comprise 300-500 spawns, in groups of 8-16, depending.[/quote]

I'm talking about for a single encounter.  Presumably you have some fights that last more than two or three rounds, yes?  And for that encounter, there tends to be a best damage spell once you're to the point of casting damage spells?
[/quote]
I'm talking about a single encounter as well. Yes, as you can see from the run logs, they take more than a few rounds to defeat. And no, for that encounter, the 'best' damage spell often varies from mob to mob. Further, a spell that harms one or more mobs, may also heal others, so targeting is critical. Mainly, though, I was still pointing out your flawed unitary mob assumption. Until you figure out what I'm talking about there, there's little point in discussing the rest, since variety in mobs is what this is all about. Even if there is a 'best' spell for any given scenario, it will often not be easy to immediately tell what it is.


[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

I hope I've explained why this is wrong. It's actually seen as inherently unbalanced because most server ops haven't playtested their servers enough to hone the saving throws, resists, etc, finely enough to balance these mechanics.[/quote]

You haven't.
[/quote]
Actually, I have. That was my polite way of saying 'I hope I've hammered on this point enough times to drive it through that thick skull of yours,' which I clearly haven't.

[quote]
Me: "The problem with death magic is that one attempt on an encounter can have you kill the entire spawn with a single death magic spell and another attempt you might kill nothing after ten death magic spells.  This means the two attempts are vastly different in difficulty solely due to the randomness and extremely binary nature.  This is unbalancing."

You: "It's not a problem if you set the saving throws, resists, etc correctly."

Regardless if the saving throws, resists, etc are "correct," you still can run into the situation I described.
[/quote]

No, you can't - part of the 'etc' you tucked in there is death magic immunity. There is no spawn in our endgame runs which can be wiped out entirely by death magic. Even if there was, the fact that you could theoretically run into it would not make it unbalancing, so long as you had adjusted saves/sr/etc to make more extreme outcomes commensurately rarer, on a bell curve distribution. Again, this is not really complicated stuff. Either you're much duller than I thought, or you're more interested in arguing with me than you are in figuring out what I'm telling you. Sorry for being so blunt about it, but it's wearing a bit thin.

[quote]
Here's a question: let's imagine you made some mobs which were completely spell immune and could only be hurt by physical damage.  They have 1 HP and like 95% effective concealment (after blind fight/listen/etc), meaning you havea 5% chance per swing to kill them.  Do you think these mobs would be a good idea to make?
[/quote]
 How about you actually say what you're trying to say, instead of tying a halfassed socratic method, which works poorly across multiple posts and varied factual settings? We do actually feature some critters similar to what you describe, a whole subset we call 'fumes'. They're incredibly hard to kill with melee, and immune to most instakill effects. They also kick back damage, making smaller damage packets to them highly undesirable. There are still a number of ways to kill them, though far from optimal, but each also features a unique 'instakill' spell vunlerability, lending additional value to specific spells (to help balance wiz v. sorc, among other things). Some fall to gust of wind, while others die to more esoteric spells - you can kill a Lemorian Scream, for example, with a Silence spell. Hell, one of our bosses is damn near impossible to kill unless he's in a Darkness AoE. But then, he's a major deity, so what do you expect? Whether or not such a mob is a 'good idea' is highly dependant on what you're trying to accomplish. Do you want ALL your bosses to require one specific spell to defeat? Of course not. But if you want to accurately portray one of those bosses, Pelor, as a senior celestial badass, it's not a half bad idea.


[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This assumes a highly simplistic set of mechanics. Even a single glance at that run log I linked you will point out the error in this thinking. Ab is not the sole determinant of a hit, or of DPS. NWN offers a wide array of mechanics to use to introduce additional granularity where necessary. The notion that a single point of Ab should be deterministic of a runs failure or success in a 'tightly balanced' server is utter nonsense - take a look back at where I point out the apples/oranges nature of your ab-to-dps comparison if you're forgetting.[/quote]

If all else is effectively equal, if a run is doable with every melee doing 15-30% less damage (they're all 1-2 AB short of what the build could be in exchange for 1-2 more saves or 40 more HP or whatever) than they should, then what does that say about how important balance is?  Is the only point of having that 1-2 additional AB each to speed the run up instead of making it doable?  At what point does it change to "the melee simply can't hit enough for the group to beat the run" or does it never reach that point?
[/quote]
Setting aside the fact that I have no idea which particular segment of ether you're pulling that 15-30% number from, this is a quixotically narrow view of balance - one that only accounts for offense. If you have a wickedly powerful offensive character who is a glass cannon, they're not going to be outputting much damage. The notion that sacrificing 1-2 ab for more saves or hp means that balance is unimportant, is absurd, unless you are one-dimensionally obsessed with offensive output without any regard for survivability. Do you actually even run a gaming server? I don't think many of our players would fall for this specious logic, to say nothing of our devs. If you're at all in doubt, just look at our builds forums. Offensive and defensive capabilities are often leveraged against each other in an effort to find a sweet spot.


[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Summarized as simply as I can, the tension is not between homogeneity and 'Rock Paper Scissors', it's between granularity and simplicity. Granularity issues with certain mechanics present problems which you can either solve by elimination (homogenizing and thereby decreasing complexity) or by introducing offsetting mechanisms (increasing complexity).[/quote]

Do we agree that adding complexity without adding depth is a bad thing?  Throwing hurdles in the player's faces solely for the sake of having hurdles is bad design.  If you want to make a monster crit immune and give offsetting mechanisms, for example, the offsetting mechanisms have to be sufficiently different and force a different style of play to add depth.  If they don't, then you've just added pointless complexity.
[/quote]
Obviously pointless complexity is bad - that's why there's a tension, otherwise everyone would just make everything increasingly complex ad infinitum. The tension exists because some degree of either homogeneity or complexity is REQUIRED to resolve some balance issues (by eliminating troublesome mechanics, or introducing new ones to make them less troublesome). Neither extreme is desireable; the trick is in finding the happy middle ground.

[quote]
And are you suggesting that in every situation where you've made some build weak against something you've added some offsettting mechanism to the build to make up for the weakness?  If not, then you are back to the R/P/S of having some builds be far more effective in certain situations even within the same general role.

More tomorrow!
[/quote]
That doesn't make any sense. If the only way of offsetting build edits was more build edits, it might, but you can always adjust opponents or mechanics, instead (never mind how nebulous a concept 'making a build weak against something' is).

Say you find, for example, that your bard song is too weak, and you buff it. You don't even need an offset if you were making that tweak in response to perceived weakness, but you might need to adjust other things, depending. Recently, we decided that bards were considered too 'essential' to runs, so we tweaked bard song downward...and letoed down the stats of all enemies by level-appropriate bard song equivalencies. This is not nearly as simple as the square peg you're trying to ram it into to make your point.

Even if making build tweaks WAS the only way to offset build tweaks, it doesn't follow at all that I would then be consigned to your ill-conceived homogeneity-RPS dichotomy, which I've already devoted considerable time to debunking. The more you type, the less I think you actually know about server design, and the more I think I'm wasting my time. If you want to elicit further replies, you're going to have to devote more energy to understanding me and less to pretzling my points in order to refute them. Suffice it to say, you seem to be relying heavily on untested theory, which you can easily refute on your own, given sufficient experimentation, if you're actually curious.

Funky

[MagicalMaster]

FunkySwerve wrote...

Seriously? Three posts to reply to one (and interwoven with other replies)? Sigh. It'd be a lot simpler for both of us if you'd just post one response, when you finsh it, but what the heck.

I'll do that going forward, then.  Thought you might prefer seeing signs of life instead of potentially waiting a week or two.

[WebShaman]

"Trying to turn the D&D rules into a DPS style game is IMHO really a no-go. You are cutting out most of what I consider the fun of playing. It is why most NWN PWs that are purely PG based normally have such huge balancing problems - because the roles being evaluated DPS-wise were never construed to be done so in such a manner."

Is asking whether he thinks such PWs are basically a fruitless endeavor and kind of pointless to make with the NWN engine such a crazy thing given his statements?

Sorry to cut inbetween both you and FS here - but this has to be addressed once and for all.

Ah, yes, it is. What I said, posted, and meant, is that to use the NWN Aurora Engine as a base for a PvM (Players vs Monsters, normally a moniker for PG style gameplay) Server basically means that you will have to redo just about everything.

See HG for what I mean here, for it is one of the shining examples of a Staff that has taken these issues seriously, and gone way beyond the standard resources to solve hard balancing issues inherent within both the ruleset offered (NWN) and the Engine limitations.

These issues exist, because, as I have posted, the source ruleset (D&D) was not created with PvM as a basis. It was created as a party based, DM run game, where roles are important, and a balanced party is expected, with a DM modifying things so that all can have fun playing their chosen roles. We call this a "role playing game".

To change this into a PvM style game (PG style, remember?), one has to alter sooo much, it is for me just not worth it. For me. FS and his staff obviously found it worth it, and have put in the work to accomplish this (although I rather suspect, that if they had known how much work they would have to invest in the first place, they may never have gone on this journey to start with! Note that this is soley my opinion, as I can't personally speak for them).

I have no idea how other teams have done in their journey down this road. I know that I bit my teeth out trying to do it way back then with The Playground (which was basically a PvM style PW) and realized that it was simply beyond my (and my staffs) capabilities. In other words, it was requiring too much work, and my scriptor basically almost flunked out of college trying to persue solutions the to problems we encountered, which pretty much went like this :

Identify problem
Make changes
Run down problems caused by changes
Rinse, repeat.

It basically lead to the "chase your tail around in a circle" type of things, which were incredibly time-intensive, and horrifyingly more and more complex! Somewhere along the line, as I stated, parts of the staff just...had to drop out and concentrate more on RL issues.

So my compliments to HG and any other style PvM (PG style) PW out there, that has faced these issues and refused to give up. But to any who are considering doing this, they should be aware of just what a mountain they are choosing to climb.

I personally consider the climb not worth the view at the top. And this is what I meant - not that it is "silly" or "stupid" to do it, or even a waste of time. To those who do it, and succeed, more power to them, for they have truly accomplished something. For me, personally, a journey not worth taking.

Some things in this discussion between both you and FS seem to be going in different directions here, which seem odd.

You expound the idea of DPS as the "catch all" of terms. Meaning here, that it is the only thing that matters. I understand that you come from a WoW background, and that in WoW this is true. FS is trying to inform you that in a PvM (PG style) NWN environment, this does not hold true.

FS is informing you coming from a NWN PvM environment, where the complexities of the type of changes necessary to the ruleset and game engine (as I have described) detail that "mere" DPS is not the only thing that matters (among other things here).

I personally have only the following to say about all this (some of the things me and my staff ran into).

In D&D, you have the roles that I have already posted. It is not my opinion, it is fact. Described in the rulesets of yore, and continued throughout the years (although we see that in 4ed, it is departing from this, but that is another issue, entirely). This is due to the nature of what the game was designed to be - a role playing game, involving a group of players playing together, with one being a "DM" (sometimes referred to as a GM (game master) or Referee, etc).

Many of the rules are NOT designed for combat alone! Many exist soley for non-combat purposes, which basically provide all the evidence one really needs to see that D&D was not created with a DPS game style in mind.

Even when we start to get into combat, as FS is pointing out, when using the D&D ruleset as a "base", we have an incredible amount of resources, techniques, spells, skills, abilities, etc in which to take into consideration. All of them influence "balance". Not all of them are able to be calculated into DPS (FS has described some of them, like Epic Dodge, Concealment, Listen skill, and so on...)

But let us get back to the basics here - one of the things that first came to my attention is the BAB differences between the class roles...

You have Fighter BAB, which is 1. Meaning, for each level, you have 1 AB.
You have Cleric and Rogue BAB, which is 3/4. Meaning exactly that.
You have Mage BAB, which is 1/2. Also meaning exactly that.

These are the melee capabilities of the 4 classes. Which basically means, without any type of balancing, you automatically have a DPS disparity when purely considering combat here (no other influences!).

If you make your m0bs "hittable" for your Mages, then Clerics and Rogues will find things easy, and Fighters will laugh at the simplicity. If you make them hittable for Clerics and Rogues, your Mages will whine, and no-one will play them, and Fighters will still find things easy. If you make things only hittable for Fighters, all others whine, and no-one will play them.

It is here, at the foundations of the ruleset, where DPS breaks down. From the very start, as one can see. It is here that if one wishes to make this ruleset into a PvM (PG style) game, one has to start from.

There is an inherent difference in these classes, built into them, especially combat-wise. This is intentional, as only the Fighter class was meant to be used for combat purposes. The other 3 classes have other roles to fill.

Now, one can begin to take spells into account for DPS here. But as is obvious, such is only for a limited amount, as Mages and Clerics were limited in the amount of magic that they could use. While a Fighter can dish out DPS the entire time, Mages and Clerics can only due so for limited amounts of time. Meaning that they have to kind of "spare" their resources...conserve them, so to speak.

This is because D&D is based on the "Jack Vance" style of Magic - memorization. Only a limited amount could be memorized, and with every casting, was "gone", so to speak. Other rulesets began to introduce a point-based Magic system, where Mana points (whatever) were used up to cast spells. A move that moves closer to a true DPS based magic system.

Then somewhere along the line, someone came up with the "all abilites are based on time" sort of system - regardless of what "class" they belong to. Meaning they can be activated, and then are on a timer before they can be used again. Ergo, DPS for all.

This, however, is not D&D, is it? Nope.

My question is, if you are going to be using the D&D ruleset (with the class roles as I outlined above pre-defined, according to the ruleset) for a PvM (PG) style environment, how are you going to address this issue? What are you going to do with all those "left over" skills, spells, abilities, etc? You know, the ones that make the other roles besides your Fighter relevant? How are you going to "tweak" them into combat, DPS orientated ones? What imbalances will that introduce, and what will have to be done to solve them? What will those changes bring into the whole "balance vs inbalance" topic?

It is like sticking your finger into the proverbial hole-in-the-dike - another hole just pops up.

There are just sooo many factors to take into consideration, that are not directly DPS related. Even the Fighter has things they can do, access to skills, etc, that influence DPS but are not directly related, like Taunting the enemy, for example (to reduce AC, increase hit chance).

The other classes just throw so many things into the fray (so to speak) that it gets...kind of crazy.

Of course, one could just go with Fighters here - BAB issue solved. Let them all cast Magic equally, Rogue skill equally, and Cleric skill equally. Basically what you have here, is a form of Play that actually exists in NWN - it has to do with super 2das, etc.

You basically only had one "class" that everyone played, and only player skill really mattered. This was, of course, only PvP. So there you have it - a DPS based NWN game. Pack out your super 2das and letoed .bics, please. I hope you are not trying to make computer AI opponents for these guys...they can even kill DMs...

[MagicalMaster]

Not ignoring this, just busy spending my time working on project for someone and working on a module for the ABC for the month. Very little time for NWN in general at the moment, sadly. Might not be able to get back to this before the end of the month.