Sean Merwin

Yeah, shows like that are great. Those sort of, not Acquisitions Incorporated, but acquisition shows where brand new people or people who are just curious or aren't steeped in the hobby like we are coming and just enjoying themselves. Just an amazing, amazing time. Totally. You're tempting me to come out there next year, Teo. You really should. It's so much fun. That's what I'm hearing.

That's what I'm hearing. But there are also excitement in our listeners and they write to us sometimes. So we're going to go to our listener corner here. We're going to first talk to Chris via Blue Sky. Now, Chris asked this question based on one of the tips that I put up on Blue Sky, TTRPG writing tips.

And what I was talking about was balance and how balance in a game can be important for a role playing game. Sometimes balance is not wanted. And so he said, would you mind to elaborate? Why do you think that many would hate a game that has very strict balance in the player options? Why do you think it's not fine for cooperative role-playing games, but it's fine for competitive games?

And I said, well, it's all from my experience and my reading playtest feedback. A big criticism we see of rules is that, well, this is too much like the Bard or yeah, this is stepping on what the Rogue is supposed to do. And 4E absolutely got criticized because the classes did not feel different enough.

The fighter and the wizard both did damage and then imposed the condition, and the flavor was different, but the outcome was the same and people didn't like that. So in that case, a game that was incredibly well-balanced got criticized because of it, not praised. Do you have that similar experience with that?

Exactly. So Chris came back with a really good question. And Chris said, your answer seems to imply that people hate things feeling samish, but not balanced per se. Would you say that people would like balance if the flavor was preserved? I don't see why balance would need for classes to lose their flavor. And that is a really insightful question. So two things come to mind here.

Balance, especially for complex games, it's hard to get balance without sameness. because there are cagey players out there who can see through this sort of forced complexity, right? We may be coming at things from a different direction, but in the end, this game is about either taking away the monster's hit points or keeping the monster from taking away your and your party's hit points.

So you can do lots of tricks, but in the end, the players who care about that can parse it to what they need to see, and they will see that this game is really, truly balanced, and that's not what they want.

And you can never underestimate the number of gamist players out there who come to role-playing games because they want to engage in a complex game with a different variety of inputs, not just everyone's rolling the d20, doing the damage, and imposing the condition. And so they want the game to feel very different, not just story-wise, but balance-wise.

They want to do completely different things and they rail against the game that doesn't do that.

Yeah, very true. And then the second question comes via Patreon from David Fetter. Last week, we talked about weapon mastery. And so David said, I like how most of the weapon mastery talk echoes a little bit of my own home rule. But after your discussion of the new rules, I'm afraid that they're going to muck up the flow of the game.

I like your idea to treat the mastery effects like encounter powers, or stick with my house rules which say the effects key off a critical hit. In either case, you get some of the fun holding the weapon that might push or trip someone without the complicated mechanic of doing it all the time. And then there's a big but...

If I severely limit the opportunity to use these weapon mastery mechanics, aren't I unbalancing the rule set that is designed to have them?

Is there some other bonus that you might grant, like a plus one to hit or damage or something, for weapon master classes that feels like the right amount of compensation to keep power levels as designed without the tactical complexity and power gaming shenanigans? So the question is, am I unbalancing a rule set designed to have these powers? Probably. You definitely do risk that.

And that's something that each DM and their players are going to have to ask themselves after using it. So when I first play 2024 seriously with a campaign, I'm going to use them as is. I'm going to encourage any martial classes to use them because I want to see what it does to a game. With players who are pretty quick and pretty knowledgeable and know how to play quickly, how it works.

But I'm already hearing stories of, well... I had a player pull out their heavy crossbow and shoot an ally in the back because they needed to be 10 feet closer to the monster in order to get there on their next turn. And then we had five characters all pull out their crossbows and shoot the monster to push them 60 feet away so the monster couldn't get to them.

And then they just kept doing that the whole time. So we're already seeing the shenanigans of what happens when you overcomplicate something in order to try to give tactical play, this can be the result.

And that's an experiment I would love to see is, all right, you with your weapon mastery, every time you hit with a weapon that has a weapon mastery thing, I'll give you plus three to damage. Or you can do the weapon mastery thing if you really need to.

I wonder how many times people and these power gamers who can figure out the math will say, you know, it's much more important for me to knock this guy prone because everyone else will have a plus. I'm, you know, the monster just went, so it will be prone for everyone. And I've got the rogue there who could sneak attack and I've got the paladin who could smite.

So I really need them to hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it doesn't take long to figure out what things, if you offer that, that little carrot to see how long it takes people to figure out what's really, truly powerful and what's not.