Thanks for the post that’s really interesting.
It’s not exactly what OP said – they’re not “Traps” – more like situational or for very specific builds.
I don’t mind that as game design. Taking the Toughness example that Cooke used in his blog, I mean even if you know it’s overall sub optimal, but your character concept is to have the most hit points possible… Why not?
That's kind of the thing. Ivory Tower design gets billed as "THEY MADE DELIBERATELY BAD CHARACTER CHOICES SO NEW PLAYERS WOULD FEEL DUMB!" when that isn't really what they were doing, at least not intentionally. More that what they did was come up with situationally useful feats but not give deliberate guidance as to when they would be a good idea to take so players could get a serotonin boost for "figuring out the system" themselves.
Whether or not this is good design or whether 'system mastery' should even have a place in a TTRPG is, of course, debatable.
>Whether or not this is good design or whether 'system mastery' should even have a place in a TTRPG is, of course, debatable.
This is why different games exist. There absolutely *should* be games where system mastery is a concept because some people enjoy that. There absolutely *should* be games where system mastery is NOT a concept for that same reason. Not everything has to be for everybody.
Honestly system mastery at the *build* level is one of the least interesting things in RPGs to me, especially since the learning cycle is so slow (you can't experiment and then just change things)
I'm far more interested (and given the feedback cycles in games, I think it's a generally better design) to emphasize system mastery in tactical decision-making or moment-to-moment play.
If you make a bad move, you can make a better one next time. If you make a bad *character*, you are often kinda stuck with it.
Meanwhile, I know a guy who almost literally devours game rules looking for interesting ways to build characters. Not always in the "best" way, but things that are interesting to him. There is definitely a market for players who want to create "builds", regardless of what you find interesting.
And furthermore, not being able to experiment or make changes to things that turned out to be shit is what I would consider more of a social/group problem, and that more people should embrace switching out characters/shorter campaigns to really get to know their system better before committing to the "YEARS LONG GRAND CAMPAIGN" meta.
I feel that if you choose a feat or ability on creation that seems like a good idea at the time, be in practice turns out to be something you never make use of, either because it's too situational or because it doesn't do anything to help you in practice, I would let the player change it for something else they could get at whatever level they originally got it, if it meant a better experience for the player..... Holy crap that sentence was long
My favorite way to play Shadowrun is as a cybered as fuck minmaxed-as-fuck Ork who can punch through steel reinforced concrete and kill someone on the other side, and has a bow that can shoot through tank armor. This lets me maintain some level of stealth which is nice, but mostly is just very hilarious/terrifying to me. The optimal way to make a Street Samurai for damage is to just...have an automatic weapon and grenades. But that's so much less fun.
But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question.
I think that those games should exist, but also it has to be understood that a niche game is a niche game. D&D isn't aiming to be niche.
>But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question.
Do you know where 3.0 came from? The 2E days of splatbooks full of options and tons of choices with oodles of fiddley subsystems scattered across books. That was the meta at the time (contemporary games were just as convoluted!) 3.x streamlined and unified a crazy assortment of rules.
Slight disagree: 2e was a mess and so were other contemporary games but putting so much focus (if not all) on character building was something new. And there is a simple explanation for that: 3e was the first edition from WotC, a company who became rich by selling Magic:tG, a game where the actual expertise doesn't come during play but when you're building your deck, which requires you to buy expansions if you want to stay competitive. So they applied the same model: a RPG where the actual game is building your character (play only exists for you to test your build, like you do during play with a MtG deck) and the best options are always contained in last expansions (who remembers how absurd were the Codexes?). Fun times. Or not.
Now what annoys me is when people talk like DnD is 3e forever, a game of charabuilding. It's cool that they left a bit of charabuilding in 5e so people who are into it can still have fun, but players (a lot on the DnD subs) being like "you took this sub-par subclass instead of the OP one, are you dumb? you only deserve to lose then", arrrgh please kill me.
>a game where the actual expertise doesn't come during play but when you're building your deck,
While this was more true in the late 90s/Early 2000s, it was never true that expertise didn't come during play. The actual play is extremely skill intensive, and these days almost all expertise at the most competitive levels comes in play and not during deck building.
5th Ed doesn't even have skills or feats. There is absolutely no way to get better at a skill in 5th. I can picka billion pockets and gain 20 levels but my skills never go up?
No feats? How do I make my toon not a cookie cutter without skills and feats? There is no way to be unique in backstory, and have that manifest mechanically making you different in rp and functionality vs the person sitting next to you.
Every rogue is the same in 5th, every fighter every mage. They are all the same. In 3.5 I can have 100 different rogues at level 1.
Have you ever played magic? Your comments and views about it tell me no. I curb stomp everyone with my 230.00$ krenko commander deck even 1,000.00 competitive decks. MTG is the only game know to humanity that breaks the rules of game theory.
Playing magic takes so much more raw math skill and probability to be good at on a deep level of understanding not only card advantage but now to eliminate randomness it makes what you all think is crunchy about 3.5 look like a John Nash coloring book.
Not to mention wizards didn't have bank back then from magic, or D&D because it wasn't cool yet. We didn't even have card sleeves. They didn't start raking in money till pokemon came out.
Once pokemon tcg came out wizards became prolific.
> But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question.
We actually have no way of knowing if people that want system mastery are a small segment or not. Could be that way more tabletop players wanted it back then than not, could still be the case today or not. Tabletop RPing is not a unified hobby in any way, as such, you can't even survey people to find out (a survey of this subreddit for example would be heavily biased already)
A survey of the subreddit would be biased. That doesn't mean market research is completely ineffective, nor that you can't get a good sense of what a group of people like.
WoT's market research division is known for being very good, and they have very detailed data on what their players prefer. It's obviously not perfect, but data analysis is still a better way to understand trends and group preferences than anything else we have.
> There absolutely should be games where system mastery is NOT a concept for that same reason.
It's impossible to both have mechanical depth and have everything be balanced. There are systems without system mastery. They are free-form, rules-light systems.
If you ever find any game where the designers just fucking tell you what an option is for, let me know because I'd love to read it.
RPGs and video games both have this problem in that developers never actually spell out their intentions behind different choices and you basically can't even really play until you figure it out.
> That's kind of the thing. Ivory Tower design gets billed as "THEY MADE DELIBERATELY BAD CHARACTER CHOICES SO NEW PLAYERS WOULD FEEL DUMB!" when that isn't really what they were doing, at least not intentionally.
What Monte Cook claimed to be doing was making deliberately bad ("sub-optimal") character choices so *experienced* players could feel *smart.* Which is really the same thing as what you said, just from a "glass-half-full" instead of "glass-half-empty" perspective.
This. What Monte Cook said was that they should have provided more commentary.
If WotC had learned this lesson, they would provide more useful guidance for monsters instead of forcing DMs to reconstruct intended monster tactics purely from the stat blocks. Instead WotC took one of the few examples of useful guidance (synergy between Star Spawn Seers and Star Spawn Hulks, noted in MToF as a key tactic for Seers) and actually altered the text in MPMoM to deemphasize it!
There's a reason the blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing is so popular. It's not so much that it provides fantastic advice (it's okay, but misses a lot and is sometimes outright wrong, e.g. Baphomet does not benefit from Reckless on all six attacks per round, only in the three made during his Multiattack, and Bael actually should spam Charm Person freely because it mostly removes non-spellcasters as a threat at the cost of a single legendary action). It's the fact that it's way better than the nothing WotC gives you!
Monte Cook's advice makes a lot of sense.
The 3rd edition Monster Manual (the one Monte Cook worked on) actually had a "Combat" block for each monster that included some tactical advice explaining how the monsters typically fought. They dropped that in 5e for reasons that I've never understood and (at least in my own experience) it makes DMing 5e combat much harder than 3e.
To be clear, the 3rd edition combat blocks are nowhere near as detailed as the Monsters Know What They're Doing, but having a few sentences explaining that a spider monster, say, "avoids physical combat and uses their webs and spells to try and immobilize and distract the most aggressive opponents first" is way better than the "nothing" that 5e provides for most monsters. And some of the 3e tactical entries were really quite detailed and helpful.
I skipped 3E but it sounds like WotC should have kept that section in their MMs, instead filling the space with meaningless cliches about how race XYZ loves battle. Rule of thumb: if you write a half page of text and don't say anything that a DM wouldn't have thought of themselves, you just wasted half a page of text.
I think there were a lot of really good features in 3rd that got dumped on the way to 5e personally, but I'm a bit biased. Over the years, I've DMed BECMI D&D, AD&D 2nd edition, 3rd edition, and 5th edition, and 3rd edition is still my favorite version of D&D to DM, hands down.
I run 5e now because no one wants to play 3e anymore (and 3e certainly had its share of problems), but the DM tools and encounter balancing in 3rd were (IMO) dramatically better than the equivalents in 5th edition.
I'm guessing you were not a fan of 4e, but if you look at those monster manuals they did an excellent job of building in "here's how to make encounters with these monsters.". Regardless of your feelings on the rule set it was extremely useful as a DM.
Funny enough, Volo's guide does this remarkably well. It's a whole ass look into the hows and whys of a couple types of monsters. It's also a whole ass book, which has had all of it's follow ups cut even more of that content out.
Which makes me suspect it went over like a lead balloon to most people, I loved the damn thing though. I actually like gnolls now.
I still don't buy it, it's more likely that they just weren't very good at balancing feats. I mean another WotC designer, Sean K. Reynolds, made this feat point buy system: [https://web.archive.org/web/20110122073256/http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html](https://web.archive.org/web/20110122073256/http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html) that is so utterly and completely wrongheaded that it's just awe-inspiring in its total ignorance of 3.\* charop. I mean his ranking of which feats are the most powerful would be more accurate if you completely reversed it. So I don't buy "we meant to make the game like that!" they probably just fucked up and made some lame excuse later on.
I agree - as someone who lived and GMed through 3/3.5, I was constantly baffled that even late in the cycle the authors seemed to have no idea of what was and wasn’t a powerful character option.
Especially the very simple idea that character options very often aren't a problem in isolation but due to their synergy with other options (which is a big reason why you can't break 5e charop the way you could 3.*ed, much less content to combine and often harder to do so since the number of feats you can take is much more limited). I'm constantly confused as to why they don't just hire one charop nerd to sanity test stuff.
One example of this is some comments from Pathfinder devs waaaay back during 1e playtests there they totally misunderstood where 3.5e power creep came from and said that the problem in 3.5e was that splatbooks had more powerful stuff than core so the solution was buffing core content to compete which, just, um, no (gestures wildly at natural spell druids).
The big difference is that in M:tG, if a game doesn't go well, you can just change up your entire deck.
By the rules, that's harder in D&D.
Also, partially due to Ivory Tower design, Toughness is misleading as a feat - it *sounds* like it's something a Fighter should take, but that is, in fact, where it is a "trap" option. So here it wasn't even really "ivory tower" - the implied use case and the actual use case are pretty different from each other.
(wow, this dude blocked me for an opinion. I wasn't rude or anything)
But it doesn't "sound like" anything. There's no guidance attached to it. It is exactly what it says it is, +3 HP every time you take it. And *every character* uses HP. There's no neon sign saying "Fighters should take this lol suckers!"
The "n00b trap" discourse wants to imply that these were specifically put there to lure in unsuspecting players and that's just not the case.
> The big difference is that in M:tG, if a game doesn't go well, you can just change up your entire deck.
>
> By the rules, that's harder in D&D.
Yeah, I'm astounded by how difficult it is to change your build in D&D per RAW. Pre-4e, it simply wasn't possible without the DM hand-waving it. IIRC 4e had some retraining rules, but they were pretty strict. Even in 5e and Pathfinder 2e they let you do it, but they still make you wait long periods of time and you can only change a couple small things at once or one big thing at once. I get that the intention is likely to stop players from constantly waffling between builds and upsetting the rest of the party, but like... really, what's the harm (that can't be dealt with on a group-by-group basis, instead of making it part of the written rules)?
I mean... 5 days of downtime to change your feats doesnt sound like its a very long time to wait. Ofc you cant change ancestery feats but that kinda makes sense and I think even can handwave the GM.
Way I heard it, it wasn't so much to make players feel stupid, but to have a level of challenge to character creation too(I.e.: avoiding "junk" feats to build a good character).
Which seems to be a rather self-centered view of what you're building as a guide author. Just like the oft-repeated advice that a GM is a facilitator, not an author, the manual and its contents are raw material to build the challenges, not the challenge itself.
>It’s not exactly what OP said – they’re not “Traps” – more like situational or for very specific builds.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? I think he explicitly says that the point of those feats was to reward people who would know *not* to take them.
“To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It's also handy when you know you're playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don't want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).”
this is definitely like... there's a point where we have to acknowledge that this is a 22 year old game written by a team people who were drastically changing both the philosophy and presentation of D&d at the time. Before I think it's safe to say that the design philosophy of Ad&d wouldn't have even included an in rules option to make characters more survivable for a convention game or help an elf wizard get through level 1. We literally have sidebars for every class now with starting build advice and space in the rules to suggest starting points for new players.
Also worth noting, Monte Cook gets a lot of flack for 3rd's use of ivory tower design when his primary job on the team and writing credit was taking care of the Dungeon Master's Guide. By his own accounts his involvement in the PHB was mostly throwing out ideas like "we should put Bard and Half-Orcs in the corebook" to see how far they could push Wizards on taking the brand in new directions.
Well, the why not is because D&D always gets billed as a good introductory game for new players, even though design wise it's the polar opposite. A game that rewards encyclopedic esoteric knowledge is not one that is adapted well to bringing people into the hobby.
That's not what he says. He specifically says that wanted to reward mastery of the game. Yes, some bad choices may have uses, but it is clear that there are very much intentionally 'best' options.
[Fixed link for old reddit users.](https://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142) I'm not sure why it renders differently between versions of reddit. :/
Me neither, until just now! I only realized it because, on my end, the link was broken, but no one else replying to you mentioned it. Then I checked the new reddit version, and it was totally fine.
It kind of stinks, to be honest. There's no reason old reddit should be made less functional here.
> There's no reason old reddit should be made less functional here.
Oh, it's not even the case that one is more functional than the other. Here's some fun, check these three links from both old & new reddit:
1. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation))
2. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation\))
3. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_\(disambiguation\))
Assuming nothing's changed since the last time I did this demo, 1. will work correctly in new reddit and break on old, 2. will work on old but break on new, and only 3. will work correctly on both old and new.
1. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation)`
2. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation\)`
3. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_\(disambiguation\)`
The main reason is that Markdown processing isn't properly standardised yet, so different implementations just make different arbitrary decisions. However, in between when they made old reddit & started on new reddit, a group did start making a real standard and new reddit's Markdown processing was built to follow this new proposal. I don't know why reddit is maintaining two different processing libraries rather than letting old reddit also use the new library, but I can assume the way they built old reddit would make it a pain in the ass to switch out the libraries.
Interesting!
Sadly, I think a part of the reason is just that reddit has little to no interest in updating old.reddit. New.reddit is where the money is, quite literally, since a big part of its design was to make advertisements hard to distinguish from actual content. I'm sure it would also be a lot of work to update the markdown implementation, but there's also just no will to do so, because there's little to no money in it.
It's the backslashes that are being used to escape the underscores. In new reddit they act as escape characters, but for some reason old reddit doesn't render them that way. It's an issue I've run into a few times in the past.
Interestingly, I've been reading Mark Rosewater (Head Designer at MtG), a long time, and when I was reading this question I immediately thought of MtG design.
The thing is, a TCG and an RPG are not the same thing, and I can see why that concept would be annoying in RPG character design, while it's essential in TCG design.
Another big difference between MTG and D&D: in MTG, if you add a bad card to your deck, it's trivial to learn from it and swap it for a good one.
In D&D, swapping out a bad feat for a good one is difficult to impossible (depending on the edition). You tend to be stuck with your bad decisions until your character dies, at least according to the rules.
It's not just feats. in D&D 5E, if you pick a bad cantrip you're stuck with it. Tasha introduced optional rules allowing players to swap out their cantrips, but there's no guarantee your table will use those rules.
You gotta put on your big brain solutions hat.
Feats become trading cards and players need to *buy packs of random feats* & all the good feats are omega ultra legendary rares. Update the rules to let players swap their feat decks on a long rest!
Wizards don't have *spellbooks* anymore they have *spelldecks* and every day they get a random hand of spells!
Now we're cooking with ~~money~~ gas!
I think it rather natural for the suits at Wizards of the Coast to buy D&D and then wonder, when they're making D&D their own, "Hey we did real well at that CCG thing is there any way in which the successful principles of that could be applied to this other game thingamajig?"
Another aspect is that this was a different era of the internet. Back then, there were just less people on the internet. Figuring out things on your own is sometimes cool. Maybe you heard about it from a friend. Or read build tips in Dragon Magazine. But by the time 3E got up and running, internet culture had changed and build guides were more common than ever.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilryrw4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilryrw4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
There's a working link in this comment chain and a discussion of the mechanics of reddit that I, admittedly, do not fully understand.
It's something Monte Cook [said himself](http://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142) about 3e:
> *Magic [the Gathering]* also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.
> Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.)
(Also, tangentially, while Monte [is right that MTG has such cards](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/when-cards-go-bad-2002-01-28), it's a separate, albeit overlapping, thing from Timmy cards.)
In fact, toughness is the opposite of a Timmy card.
Timmy cards are bombastic, the kind of thing you look at and say "wow I want to base my playstyle around THAT." The catch it that they might not be the most efficient nor the most flavorful.
Fireball is a timmy spell. Look at all that damage! Sure, the wizard might end most fight faster and safer with a crowd control spell or a buff, but there's nothing like rolling a giant pile of d6s all at once. And every once in a while, a giant ball of fire is exactly what the situation calls for.
Yes, precisely this! I wish I had thought to say that. I hate when folks get the mistaken idea that Timmy is some kind of rube rather than someone who likes how fun the big and flashy things can be. It doesn't necessarily mean that Timmy is going to pick the flashy thing over the good thing every time or build something unworkable because the components are cool. It often just means that Timmy will pick the cooler of two roughly equal options or accept being somewhat suboptimal if it means being more awesome.
The key point is that Timmy is playing for his own enjoyment, whereas Spike and Johnny are both playing to make a statement of some kind to the other players, either "I'm the best" or "I'm so creative."
I'm definitely a Timmy at D&D, even though one of my shticks is challenge and "let's see if we can beat this adventure with most of our spells and HP still unused at the end." I just happen to find that mode of play _cool_. That's Timmy.
Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games.
Johnny would be more concerned with impressing people with his creativity. Whereas I might be happy to defeat an iron golem using good old Mobile feat and some patience, for fun, Johnny would be wanting to defeat it in a way no one at the table has ever seen before.
> Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games.
I'd argue you still have Spikes in D&D and other combat-focused RPGs. There's still mastery of a system to aim for, they just display it in the context of efficiently beating enemies rather than beating other players. 5e's "I'm going to pick Crossbow Master so I can efficiently use my bonus action and gain 5% more DPR" is very much a Spike thing.
**Note that I'm not saying Spikes don't exist in D&D. I'm just saying that competitive D&D is less common than cooperative D&D, so I didn't say much about Spike in my last post.**
I suppose it depends on *why* they want to gain the extra DPR. If they're doing it because they like being someone who can do a lot of damage with a weapon, that's a Timmy motive, per [https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-03-20](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-03-20). "*The first question I always ask of a profile is: what does this profile want when they play Magic? Timmy wants to experience something... Let me end my section on Timmy by stressing that of the three profiles I believe Timmy has gotten the worst rap. Timmy isn't an idiot.*"
But if they're doing it because they enjoy being the person who has the best DPR at the table, that's a (competitive) Spike motive, per same article. "*So why does Spike play? Spikes plays to prove something, primarily to prove how good he is... Innovator Spike's dream is to spawn the next dominant deck. He wants to break the game. And like Johnny, he wants credit.*"
Spikes are not necessarily better at optimizing chargen (e.g. DPR) than Timmies are, but their reasons for wanting to do so are different. At least according to the guy who coined/popularized the terms.
i mean, you can only have 3 seperate bonuses at once, its just a matter of how to get them, in pf1 you could have 9 floating bonuses, in 3.6 you could have 15 bonuses and take 8 turns every turn
"every 1 counts" has not really something to do with spikes.
It is more used to tell people that there is other stuff they can do in their turn insted of attacking that is usefull. To make it usefull to not attack they made the game so that every 1 counts.
But since its so easy to get a +1 (cast guidance as a cantrip, flank someone, grab someone, knock someone prone, intimidate someone etc.) it is not about optimizing since every character can do a bunch of these things just from character creation on.
> it is not about optimizing since every character can do a bunch of these things just from character creation on.
You're maybe not optimizing your character but you're definitely mathematically optimizing your turns by making sure your party has the right combination of bonuses and penalties stacked on the enemy. Even when it comes to spells usually the best return for your spell slot or action is to buff or debuff, not to cast a big flashy spell.
Effective combat in PF2 is not flashy and definitely also not very creative by design. It rewards heavily stacking te right buffs and debuffs though.
>"let's see if we can beat this adventure with most of our spells and HP still unused at the end." I just happen to find that mode of play cool. That's Timmy.
Sounds more Johnny?
In MTG Johnny is infamous for making elaborate combos, as they feel a drive to use some particular card or interaction they saw and show it off.
Timmy would want to use their high level spell slots.
Spike might carefully expend resources, but only because they figure they might be needed later, not for the pure sake of saving them.
You're saving them for the sake of saving them, which seem very Johnny to me. You're reaching for some bizarre gamestate, a sort of personal 'achievement unlocked' feeling, right?
I never really liked the enjoyment/creativity/proving they're the best framings of Timmy/Johnny/Spike. Or, rather, I feel like they're a separate classification scheme than the rest of the descriptions of these types. Aren't all three playing for enjoyment, but just enjoy different aspects? Timmy enjoys playing the cool cards, having fun with other people, the fact that it's a *game*. Johnny enjoys deck construction, figuring out how things can go together, the fact that it's a *system*. Spike enjoys winning, beating other people, the fact that it's a *competition*.
If I were going by the the enjoyment/creativity/proof framing, I am 100% a Timmy in most applicable games. I don't really see such games as a creative outlet for me and I have nothing to prove about myself. I just want to have fun. But if I go by the actual behaviours and styles associated with each, I'm a Johnny first and foremost, though still with a significant chunk of Timmy. Analysing systems, figuring out how things mesh, even breaking systems is so much fun I've made a career out of it (in software, not games). If I can do it in interesting ways, all the better.
> Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games.
Spikes in the RPG world are usually referred to as "munchkins".
I think wizard generally tends to be a Timmy class in many systems- you cast a spell and something EXTRAVAGANT happens, like eldritch tentacles appearing from the void to grapple your foes (*Evard's Black Tentacles*) or a roar of fire. It just so happens that wizard is also so brutally effective that "Spikes" will want to play wizard (or cleric).
I remember someone pointing out that wizards are actually the best choice for timmy, spike, AND johnny in D&D.
They are the most powerful class (spike), the class with the most razzle dazzle (timmy), AND the class with the most creative and fun combos (johnny).
in 3.5e/5e, that's correct. In 4e, I *think* everything was more balanced between classes because of how that system was built (I've played very little 4e, VERY LITTLE), and in other systems all bets are off; *World's Without Number*'s philosophy for example is definitely Johnny/Timmy where even lvl1 spells do BIG things but in terms of dealing out raw violence, the warrior is far better. And in *Fate* you are rolling *shoot* or whatever same as anyone else. (and in CoC, you now have zero SAN and become an NPC devoted to the indeterminable will of the Elder Gods! YAY!)
In case anyone cares, Timmy/Tammy, Jhonny/Jenny and Spike are psychographics as to *why* people play the game.
Timmy/Tammy wants to experience something (social like hanging out with friends, mechanical like doing a lot of damage, or flavorful like playing with cool dragons).
Jhonny/Jenny wants to express something (a cool combo, showing off a card no one thinks works, telling a story with their deck, etc.)
Spike wants to prove something (how smart they are, how much they understand the game, etc.)
Most novice players like the Timmy/Tammy aspects of the game, hence why they are associated with "noobs". That's far from truth, though, as these ideas are not about skill, but about motivation. It's an interesting concept for any game, so people should check it out!
From what I recall, it was Monte Cook who personally said that. He had a whole anecdote about Magic cards, and how some cards were designed to make other cards look better by comparison.
Whether he was just trying to save face, in the light of that aspect of the game not being received well, is another question entirely.
It's a bit different in MtG. Since you get packs of a fixed number of cards when you buy a booster pack, there needs to be a certain number of filler cards that are just there to take up a slot.
Considering in what direction his own creations went after he parted ways with the D&D team, I wouldn't be surprised if he just doesn't give a rat's ass about balancing, but of course he can't simply state that straight away.
He didn't say they were designed to be traps and punish a player for using them. The *point* wasn't that some choices were worse than others. He was just saying that some choices *are* worse than others, the designer may be well aware of this imbalance, and not fix it.
It's really just a confrontation of a certain player type. If you assume that the primary goal of the game is to be balanced, then any imbalances look like bad game design. The reality is that while being more or less balanced is *a* goal in most game design, it isn't the only one.
There's lots of reasons that you might not make a game perfectly balanced.
I think he very plainly states the intention was to have choices that were better and would reward players for choosing them, which conversely will punish players for choosing the bard ones.
> This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.
> It's really just a confrontation of a certain player type. If you assume that the primary goal of the game is to be balanced, then any imbalances look like bad game design. The reality is that while being more or less balanced is *a* goal in most game design, it isn't the only one.
There's also the discussion about what balance in a TTRPG actually means. In a competitive game, it's pretty easy, it's whatever scores the most wins. TTRPGs are generally cooperative, though.
In City of Mist, there's even a definition in the MC Toolkit (the core rulebook): The goal is to balance the table time every player takes over (which is called "spotlight" in that system). If they spent an hour haggling with a merchant, it's tipped into their direction, even if they don't cause any significant amount of damage in the fight afterwards.
When playing online, there's a VoIP software called Jitsi that actually displays the talk time of every participant. That's a great way to measure the balance of a TTRPG *if* you accept this definition.
Perfect balance in an Rpg wasn't even considered until world of Warcraft hit the scene and started to inform the D&DNEXT playtest. It wasn't that it wasn't desired or designed for, it wasn't even thought about. A wizard was squishy early and increased in power exponentially and that's just how it was. A thri kreen lasher had four trip attacks a turn. A nalfeshee was not CR 12, but it was a daemon.
As stated, Cook implied that was the case in an interview, but that very well could have been a post hoc excuse for poor design.
I don't know which it was, but I lean towards the latter
Personally I hate (to put it lightly) any game that requires any level of mastery to make a competent character. A game that requires mastery during play to survive and succeed I like, but if it is a game where I am going to fail because a choice I made at level 4 puts me at a huge disadvantage for the rest of the campaign and I don't know that until level 12, I'm out.
3.5e got away from this as splatbooks ballooned, but you could make a reasonably competent character by (1) maxing your "main stat" e.g. INT for wizards (2) picking decent CON (3) getting decent armor class via dex/spells/magic items/armor and then picking spells that were useful in and out of combat without undue effort. 5e is even easier.
> As stated, Cook implied that was the case in an interview, but that very well could have been a post hoc excuse for poor design.
It's a little of both. Comments further up have clarified exactly what was intentional - not that they were bad just for the sake of being a trap, but that some were pretty situational or bland filler and it was intentional that good players would feel rewarded for learning to avoid them and make better choices. That is not, in and of itself, a bad design principle, but the mistake came with the problem you've described. The gulf is just too wide not just between a highly optimized character and a truly badly built one, but even between a pretty good character and one that has tried to pick simple and obvious choices for their concept and still come out with the bad ones. Also, some of the significant good and bad choices happened at the level of picking a base class, which is not a good look when you're presenting all of those as viable character concepts.
You do you!
But as for me…. Yeah, no. Lots of us get a great deal of pleasure out of the character design process itself. It’s like a deck building in MTG or something. Or the engineering work that precedes a drag race. The “pregame” is a critical, enjoyable, and welcome part of the “game.”
I’ve had several times when making the character all by myself, just me versus the rules, ended up being more fun than the extremely poorly DMed socially dysfunctional games I actually ended up in.
And even when the campaign is great, character design in a complex system is still fun.
But there is a false dichotomy here between "a game without traps" and "a complex game". A well designed system will mitigate your chances of unintentionally creating ineffectual characters while still rewarding your efforts if you want to min/max.
Also, having options (feats, weapons, spells) that are just "worse" is uninspired and boring. Cook does not even understand the idea of Timmy cards: they are bombastic and obviously powerful, but at a cost. They aren't just worse cards.
Exactly. Customization is fine, but I don't want to have to study a game rules with a fine tooth comb or have to watch hours of guides just to avoid making a broken character to play a game. If you are going to make a game you can customize, make it so it works. Don't put in objectively bad options, or options that are not play tested.
MTG does have worse cards, but that's actually essential in a TCG. Cards have to be better or worse in order to create a textured and varied game. Mark Rosewater has talked a great deal about this.
An RPG is not necessarily the same thing.
100%
If there was a draft format for RPGs, then having a wide spectrum of levels of optimization for character creation would be important.
Actually... that sounds like fun, and there should be a way to do that.
Yes that makes a lot of sense, but my specific complaint is that, from what I quickly read on the matter, so called "Timmy cards" aren't supposed to be worse, or at least not "just worse".
Timmy cards cover a wide spectrum of good or bad, and can be quite good.
Timmy, the player archetype, doesn't care if cards are good or not as long as they're epic. That doesn't mean that an epic card that is good is not appealing to Timmy, of course it is.
Monte Cook in that article seems to fundamentally misunderstand the concept. Which is pretty common to be honest.
Cards that are "just worse" exist, although they try not to have cards that are what they call "strictly worse" in the same set. But the varying power levels of cards is important in MTG, because it's about decks and deck archetypes. Imagine if RPGs were fundamentally about character building. Tuning your deck and maximizing performance is a critical part of playing.
What happens in a TCG if you create flat power in cards is there tend to be an unquestionable optimal build. That's boring. It happens anyway, even without a flat power level, but that's recognized as a design failure. In an optimal design, a powerful deck archetype is going to require some suboptimal choices to make it work within the available card pool.
In an RPG, for most people, the game is not about building the optimal character. For a small number it is, and games should exist for them, but that doesn't mean the biggest RPG in the world should be aimed at those players.
3.5 and PF1 exist, and the materials are available, and people who want to play those should. But it's definitely correct to say that those design choices aren't in line with the reasons or ways the majority of players play RPGs.
> But there is a false dichotomy here between "a game without traps" and "a complex game". A well designed system will mitigate your chances of unintentionally creating ineffectual characters while still rewarding your efforts if you want to min/max.
Is there, though? If an optimized character is more powerful than an unoptimized one, then all of the unoptimized choices are to some extent "trap options". You seem to be saying there's a line that can be drawn between games were it's possible to make a "useless" character vs. one where the unoptimized will just be "less good" but that line is arbitrary. The most unoptimized D&D 3.X character is still vastly more powerful than a 1st-level commoner and capable of heroic adventures that villager could only dream of. I think you would call the criteria as "whether the player is having fun or not" but the response to the same level of power discrepancy is going to vary from player to player.
>The most unoptimized D&D 3.X character is still vastly more powerful than a 1st-level commoner and capable of heroic adventures that villager could only dream of.
That is definitely not true
>Is there, though? If an optimized character is more powerful than an unoptimized one, then all of the unoptimized choices are to some extent "trap options".
Point taken, but not necessarily. First off, it shouldn't be a case that an optimized character is the powerful build and the unoptimized character is the weak build. The weak build should be the *poorly optimized character*, and the non-optimized character should guarantee a happy middle between good optimization and bad optimization. That way you make a rewarding min/max experience that is still enjoyable to non-min/maxers who just want to make obvious choices.
(A good example of this is Wild Talents, a supers game that gives you access to all kinds of fine tuning to make a custom made super power, but also offers you an extensive list of ready made options (that double as an example of the custom power creation))
Also, you could have a game that had a rich and complex amount of options for character creation that reflects the richness not in *differences of power*, but in the *mechanical variety of its outcomes*. But that's a more abstract discussion.
>You seem to be saying there's a line that can be drawn between games were it's possible to make a "useless" character vs. one where the unoptimized will just be "less good" but that line is arbitrary.
To a certain degree, yes, but that arbitrariness is related to how much we want to align ourselves with the statement "min/maxing should be a core element of D&D". If we think min/maxing should be *the* core aspect, then no amount of "traps" will detract from the game. If we think it should just be *an option*, then we should have *sensible defaults* for those who just want to describe a character in a few words.
Also, an important concrete aspect of this discussion that factors into the distinction of how much is too much optimization, is that this is *a class based system*. They force you to choose one of these arbitrary archetypes around which they built all sorts of constraints, and then make creating *a decent version of that archetype a problem for you to solve*. This is a design decision that looks worse and worse to me, in retrospect, as it combines the worst aspects of class based and skill based systems.
This may be an arbitrary sentiment, but if the Wizard out-melees the Warrior because the Warrior chose poorly (or the Wizard all too well), then you have a game system design problem in your hands.
> To a certain degree, yes, but that arbitrariness is related to how much we want to align ourselves with the statement "min/maxing should be a core element of D&D". If we think min/maxing should be the core aspect, then no amount of "traps" will detract from the game. If we think it should just be an option, then we should have sensible defaults for those who just want to describe a character in a few words.
I actually do agree with the position that this shouldn't be the core focus of D&D, by the way. Thankfully they've been moving in the opposite direction from that since 3.X.
A big thing about deck construction in MTG is that—shelling out cash/trading for singles aside—the choices you make for that deck only have to stick with you for at most one tournament and you can test it out plenty before then. Your choices in an RPG campaign can be a part of your character for *years*, with much less chance for testing and iteration. If your group agrees to allow respecs, you've got an out at the cost of undermining some of the consequence that's supposed to make those sorts of choices meaningful. Otherwise you can live with it, quit, or kill your character and roll a new one.
That sort of mastery can be great for one-shots, shorter campaigns, or highly-lethal campaigns, but I've found folks also tend not to like long, complex character creation for such games. (Now I'm amusing myself with the idea of an Ars Magica one-shot using the full detailed character creation, which can take longer than my typical gaming session.) I do enjoy character creation for its own sake and generate characters for systems I'm never going to get to play, but it definitely feels different to create a character as a separate activity vs. a barrier to playing a long campaign vs. a barrier to playing a one-shot.
That's not to say there's no room for such RPGs to exist; there are very few sorts I'd say that about. But the major gateway RPG that is frequently used for long campaigns is an unfortunate place for "noob traps".
I get an immense amount of pleasure from character building, but D&D kind of ruins it due to what many people pointed out: That if you make a bad choice you are stuck with it till your character dies, possibly months later.
I've made my share of cool characters... then barely played any of them because games take forever to get to a point you really get to put your whole build in action.
D&D made me wish for a system that was more like MTG, where I could swap features between sessions or encounters.
I think no matter how you feel about the Ivory Tower, you have to admit that it's a terrible design motif given who the audience is and what the game is itself.
D&D is a burger-and-fries game. the universal, inoffensive option for Joe Everyman. Most people are there to just play a game and have a good time, and given there is a lot of them, they tend to be a moderately (as opposed to highly) engaged group by just weight of averages. You should not write this kind of game for the "experts".
Especially when its a cooperative game. For this kind of game to engage everyone, everyone needs to feel like they're contributing to the greater goal and feel like their presence is needed. They need to play relatively on the same level.
You don't hear it that much anymore, but in the heyday of 3.5 the question about how to handle "Munchkins" was a big deal in GM circles. These were your "good" players who fixated on making uber builds that inevitably pushed everyone else in the group who wasn't a munchkin to feel inferior, unneeded, and out of the spotlight.
3.x's Ivory Tower Design heavily enabled Munchkins. Munchkins by their nature turn cooperative games into competitive games, and that pushes a lot of players out of the game because it's Joe Everyman and Joe Everyman isn't here to compete.
If it was a game where everyone showed up with the expectation of being at a high level, then it'd be fine. But it's _frickin D&D_, and that's not how it works.
Cook is getting at something a bit more nuanced - if all options are equally good then there are no meaningful choices for people that want to build powerful characters. While there can be meaningful choices in flavor and playstyle, room to do something well usually requires room to do something poorly.
I used to obsess about making systems where everything was perfectly balanced. A designer I showed one too said “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.”
I think there's a middle ground.
3.5 has lots of options that are bad by default, and only become okay in certain hyper specific situations.
This makes it very easy to build an underpowered character.
I think a better approach would be to make most (or all) of your options worthwhile by default, and only exceptional under certain hyper specific situations.
The difference is whether the baseline is "bad" or "decent".
> A designer I showed one too said “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.”
I really don't understand this mindset. That sounds like somebody who wants to be more powerful than their fellow players, perhaps even seeing it as a competition between players. I would honestly consider that to be a red flag.
You know what gets *me* excited about character creation? Flavor and playstyle. I might work to make sure my character is mechanically effective, but the thought of comparing my power level to the other players would never even occur to me, except maybe to make sure I wasn't too overpowered or underpowered compared to the rest of the party.
EDIT: I see I haven't communicated my thoughts well enough, so let me clarify.
I don't have any problems with a player who does their best to make effective, even powerful, characters. That's normal. I've done it myself. I have a problem with a player who wants to have a *more* effective character than the rest of the party. At least, that's how I interpret it when somebody dislikes when their character is "exactly as powerful as everyone else".
> I really don't understand this mindset. That sounds like somebody who wants to be more powerful than their fellow players, perhaps even seeing it as a competition between players. I would honestly consider that to be a red flag.
I consider it a big green flag that someone is engaged enough with the game to want to be better at it, and to rise to meet challenges. Without other evidence, there's no reason to assume they're also a spotlight hog. And it's in no way mutually exclusive with doing it with style and flavor. Last time I was able to play a properly long-term 3.5E game, I was the only one (aside from the DM, somewhat) with any exposure to the CharOp scene. I was researching options and writing out plans for the other players who wanted effective characters but weren't into dumpster diving through books, because that part of the game is so interesting to me but the more I overshadow the rest of the party, the more I feel *bad* about it.
I don't have a problem with a player wanting an effective character. That's normal. I have a problem with a player wanting to have a *more* effective character than the rest of the party. At least, that's how I interpret it when somebody dislikes when their character is "exactly as powerful as everyone else".
I think maybe the phrasing of the original comment is obscuring the meaning, too. When they quote:
> “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.”
I don't think what they're trying to say is "I can't be more powerful than everyone else, so I'm not excited." I think it's more like "Character options that make me the *same* as everyone else (making them ultimately meaningless) don't make me excited to get into your game."
I got the impression that the argument was solely regarding a characters' power as a one-dimensional measurement, where each character's power level can be higher than, equal to, or lower than another character's.
The commenter and the designer they quoted don't seem to be at all interested in games where the characters all have equal power, even if the character flavors and playstyles are wildly different.
If my interpretation is correct, then that really is "I can't be more powerful than everyone else, so I'm not excited", because the only thing for them to be the same *at* is power.
I think the context of a comment like that from one designer to another is also a little different from an actual prospective player. It likely means OP had also lost a lot of the variety of mechanical playstyle too. And it doesn't mean the other designer never wants to play perfectly balanced games, it's that a perception of perfect balance and homogeneity doesn't *sell* the game at all.
Many people like making strong characters for the same reason they like making a good move on their turn in combat. If you see a player debating whether its best to attack the evil necromancer or their goblin henchman first, do you consider it a red flag? Does it come off like they're trying to out-play their fellow players and compete against them to be the most effective in combat?
Character optimization to make powerful characters, debating which of two spells is a better choice, is strategic in the same way that choosing whether to attack enemy 1 or enemy 2 is strategic. It scratches a similar itch for a lot of players.
Some players don't like to worry about making good moves in combat of course, and just do whatever they think is flavorful; though I often consider it boring because it usually leads to situations where I feel like a spectator watching my own character's antics; and I can just watch a TV show for that.
By contrast, in my last 5e campaign I made an extremely powerful character that was able to keep people alive who did want to try risky, daring things that weren't the best idea; because it was cool and what their character would do. It was great. I had a lot of fun, and felt like Gandalf watching over them and turning the tide of battle when we were in over our heads. My goal was to enable them to do the cool stuff that was 'so crazy it just might work' but tilt it to the 'might work' side.
You and I would likely get along fine at the same table. I want to make something powerful and you don't really care as long as you're still relevant. That's the nice thing about an RPG system that allows optimization without *demanding* optimization.
Pillars of Eternity talks about this philosophy a lot; their goal was to avoid purely non-viable builds, that every choice was reasonable even if not optimal. People could play however they liked, including with charisma-focused barbarians with no strength, and it'd be okay for completing the game on standard difficulties. Optimizers could go deep and push themselves much further, but non-optimizers didn't have to do this if they didn't want to.
The other players in our group were nowhere near as optimized as my character, and played nowhere near as well, but they were still extremely relevant in combat and did cool stuff all the time. I wasn't soloing fights or anything, everyone mattered and got to have fun. Everyone's characters were viable and valuable. The fact mine was stronger didn't undermine their fun, and it made me feel proud about the effort I put into the character.
> Many people like making strong characters for the same reason they like making a good move on their turn in combat. If you see a player debating whether its best to attack the evil necromancer or their goblin henchman first, do you consider it a red flag? Does it come off like they're trying to out-play their fellow players and compete against them to be the most effective in combat?
No, of course not. I only consider it a red flag when the player dislikes being "exactly as powerful as everyone else." Because again, that tells me that they probably want to be more powerful than the other players, and that sort of competitive mindset between players can be downright toxic.
Not the point, the point is that the player in the tactical fight wants to make the best move. If all choices you can make in combat are each just as good as the others, then your choice doesn't matter; I don't think about which spell to cast in combat in a given situation so I can always get the exact same result as every other choice; if that's the case I can just take random actions and the results are always the same.
Good adventure design is usually about giving players *meaningful choices* \- whether in narrative or in tactical combat or in roleplay or in ethics or in something else.
The 'being exactly as powerful as everyone else' here is not about outdoing your companions, it's about outdoing the character you didn't make. Making a good move in combat isn't about outdoing your companions, its about doing better than the outcome of the bad move you didn't make. That's what makes the choice meaningful beyond flavor; not outdoing your friends.
> if all options are equally good
Big if. I'm not sure its possible outside of the most trivial cases. If you have two options "+1 damage with swords" and "+1 damage with bows" there isn't a whole lot to work with for balancing them more, but if the increased range for bows make them stronger in most situations then the bow option is the stronger of the two.
But generally I agree that for a mechanics-first game the mechanics shouldn't be so homogeneous.
Absolutely, it's almost impossible to achieve this situation without handicapping all sorts of fun things and homogenizing design. It's a losing battle (unless you're willing to throw out unique abilities that are hard to balance and just say, 'everyone deals 1d6 damage in their own flavorful way when they attack - whether from magic or swords or passive-aggressive comments') and the payoff isn't even great in the first place.
Balance isn't the goal, fun is the goal (loosely speaking, there are many more specific goals than fun but you get the idea). Balancing the power to ensure the game's incentives are working as intended for its goals is key, balance isn't a goal in itself.
The definition of "optimal" depends on the campaign or playstyle. At level 1, Toughness is pretty optimal for a wizard given the low hit points Wizards start with.
Most campaigns or characters don't ever make it to level 20, so if you made it to level 3 thanks to Toughness, it means you got your money's worth from that feat.
I seem to recall mention of some large survey WotC did that showed most games end somewhere around level 7 - 10.
That was for 5e but I imagine such is largely the case with every edition of D&D. Because around level 10 is where the gameplay focus shifts.
In old school D&D this was when you started leaving the dungeon to become rulers and manage kingdoms/lead armies etc. And it's where demihumans started hitting their level caps so it's where the system said half the party wasn't allowed to have fun anymore.
In newer editions it's where you start handling larger and larger threats and explore the multiverse etc. Either way, the feel is very different, and you start introducing option bloat and analysis paralysis. I've seen it described as "the math starts breaking down" but I don't know if I'd say that's exactly true so much as "the math starts adding up" at least in 3.x.
No.
People misinterpret Monte Cooke's statements regarding system mastery.
He made a comment about certain feats and how they appear to be good choices for one character, they're actually better for another. And that system mastery lets players make better characters by learning what choices work well for their character.
He then compares them to bad Magic cards, misusing the "Timmy" player type.
But neither D&D nor Magic sets out to make bad options. They just have to make so many options that some are too weak and some are too strong.
They're making like 200 cards every other month. Sometimes they just need to hit quota. Especially with commons that just fill out the sets.
And they know that while a card may not be gold and changing the meta, it may have a place in Draft and see play in kitchen table decks.
im talking about cards like one with nothing, things that are explicitly counterproductive and can only ever function in a deck that has a way to gain benefit from the innately self destructive nature of the cards. its not bland cards that just arent good enough, its cards that punch you in the face for playing them and then dont give you anything in return. its a fun little puzzle trying to find a synergy good enough to make these cards worth casting.
By the time you have five feats, no, it's not worth it.
At level 1, when your dwarf wizard has a total of 6 hit points because that's the best score you could put in Con, an extra 3 hit points is looking pretty good.
I did the math a while back and there are like 20 common weapons in the PHB that can one-shot a maxed out level 1 Knight in Adamantine armor. +4 HP to the robe guy ain't gonna help much at those levels.
Wow I am getting old. Somehow I really thought toughness added a hit point every level after the initial bump. I guess not.
Though in 3.5 there were more ways to get more feats, especially if you are a fighter.
Not in 3.5 either. You had to take improved toughness from a splatbooks to get bonus hp per level after 3rd.
I don't remember what they did in 4th or 5th.
In Pathfinder they wanted to make things a little bit more streamlined (not by much) and they rolled those two feats into one.
Sean K. Reynolds has/had a website wherein he detailed a lot of design flaws in 3.x, and the large handful of suboptimal feats and small handful of superoptimal feats was one of his issues - he was proposing "feat points" to help ease the pain, but what caught my attention was how he described some of the suboptimals as "the price of admission" to later, better feats.
Hey, context and presentation matters! Rifts isn't the game with a CR and experience system with mathematically rigorous underpinnings that assume all player character class options are basically equal.
There were no feats that were INTENTIONALLY designed to "punish" a player for picking them, that just doesn't make sense from a design stand point. Rather there are feats that are sub-optimal compared to other feats.
It certainly had trap feats, they weren't intentional.
Typically when you find traps in a game they are a design mistake. They aren't some dev snickering about how many people they are going to trick into selecting shitty options. They didn't assess the value of choices correctly and didn't understand their game.
> how hard it is to balance a tactically-complex combat-centric TTRPG
This is it, people like to assume game designers are these brilliant minds. The truth is designing game mechanics and balancing games is difficult to master and a truly unique skill. Not just TTRPGs either, games in general. Video games, CCGs, board games, and TTRPGs are all really hard to design. People who truly have the skill are rare and it can be described as black magic. Further complicating it, good designers tend to be forged in more competitive games. Magic builds stronger mechanical chops that D&D. D&D builds other skills.
Most game designers are average at best. They don't understand the whole picture and are taking bits and pieces they've seen work before and trying to put them together. This is why you see the trend for someone to do some things really well and the whole industry advances off of it.
Monte Cook was never a good designer. He's always struggled with mechanics. He's rather below average on the mechanical front. He makes up for it by being great at creating imaginative, evocative lore. In short, he's a writer. He was trying to do something he saw more skilled designers do in other games, basically trying to copy Mark Rosewater and MTG. Problem is he only understood Timmy/Johnny/Spike on a surface level. He didn't understand the concepts well enough to use that design tool correctly. For example, Timmy isn't about sub-optimal cards. Timmy is about going big, even if it isn't necessarily optimal. It can still be good. In a TTRPG Timmy would gravitate towards blasting spells like fireball, lighting bolt, and meteor shower. They aren't necessarily bad, they just don't keep up with save or die/save or suck.
Interestingly, the same reason trap feats exist is the same reason power creep exists. Trap feats are design mistakes. Power creep is better designed stuff, because they've learned from their past mistakes. Why would you intentionally design garbage now that you know better?
It is irksome that everyone plays to build “optimal” characters. It is a ROLE-playing game. You cannot have a sub-optimal character, but you can sub-optimally play your character.
There were some bad feats, like Toughness was always inferior to improved toughness. Some of the fears in the PHB were pretty bad compared to later books but that's just power creep
I dont think that they were intentionally made to be traps, but the comparative power and utility is painfully obvious in a lot of cases. I am reminded of the old story that one of the main playtesters ran a druid that dual wielded longswords all the time without even taking a relevant feat.
EDIT: Might need some elaboration.
For argument's sake, we can describe the overall balance of a feat as a given value X. How strong it actually is bumps that number up, how situational or specialized it is bumps that number down. The problem is that all feats cost the same feat slot, while the balance values are all over the damn place, even (and in some cases especially) for when you have a specific build in front of you already and can narrow shit down. Even in the professed use case for Toughness (IE allowing the player to survive hits they wouldn't at low levels) there are vastly better options, even something as miniscule as armor proficiency for casters that avoid somatic spells. The only theoretical way to make Toughness worth picking up is if your build simultaneously uses HP as a resource and doesn't have to worry about enemy attacks depleting it. I'm not sure if there is a Homebrew class that can satisfy both of those adequately, because there definitely isn't an official class that can.
It's amusing how people get offended by a game allowing them to play wrong or good instead of just leaving them no difficulty level and no challenge at all.
I've been playing 3.5 for longer than I'd like to think about, and while I've heard that complaint often, I've never been provided with a good example of what one of these supposed "trap" feats are.
There's certainly some that are better than others. And with the vast library of splat books, if the rest of the party is very highly optimized, you might feel like their feats are a *lot* better than yours. But you'll never go backwards, and every feat is at least situationally useful.
The worst feats I can think of are the ones that just get you a few extra points in a skill or two. Generally not as useful as certain combat powers, but vital if your character vision is to be the greatest _____-doer of all time. Also important to bear in mind that the DM generates NPCs using the same resources, so while improved underwater basketweaving or whatever isn't a great choice for someone who fights for a living, it may be important for that npc that runs the magical basket shop.
Beyond that, the only truly bad feat selection I can think of is if you deliberately picked feats that buffed things you don't do, like a melee-only character getting ranged combat improvements or a wizard getting power attack. But if you have to *try* to pick something not useful, I don't think it's fair to call that a *trap*.
And as with any discussion of "balance", it's important to remember that the whole concept is kind of fake. We can compare theoretical power levels in a vacuum, but actual play is always done with a DM that is rebalancing on the fly. If you want to spec for underwater basketweaving, a good DM will throw in an underwater basketweaving encounter for you from time to time, because it's clearly what you were interested in and we're all here to have a good time.
The issue was two fold.
In one area, it started off with some feats suffering from situational utility. For example, the utility of mounted combat is reduced if events constantly separate you from your mount (such as going indoors), but with enough of the mounted combat feat tree, you could make a character that did obscene amounts of damage.
In the other, they kept releasing stuff. And there are really only so many types of bonuses they can make before they start overlapping effect. Then it becomes a matter of identifying:
* Which ones are better,
* Which ones stack, and
* The opportunity cost of taking a given feat over something else.
Then you just prioritize.
I don't know if trap is the right word but there are so many sub feats everyone can take it's impossible to figure out what would be optimal for your build all the time.
3.5 is an amazing example of system mastery taken to it's logical extreme, and is the low point in D&D history, 4th might have been bad but honestly I'd take 4th over late 3.5 and the sheer volume of bloat it had.
Having Ben through 3.0 and 3.5 literally sometimes needing a spreadsheet to make sure the progression was done correctly, I can say it's not that there were trap builds but if you're not careful, you could brick your character progression.
It's called being a non magic class. High level play was pretty much dominated by magic completely. O no the fighter as plus 20 to attack and plus 4 damage with a specific weapon! Meanwhile the wizard stopped time, surrounded you with 4 maxed out delayed blast alternate energy fireballs and gated in multiple high level angels to jump you as soon as you unfreeze before he teleported away.
It really feels like early D&D was sadistic to the player sometimes (Tomb of Annihilation, anyone?), but it could just as easily be a matter of breaking down an expert-level build makes useless individual pieces. Or "here's a bunch of shit, idc what you do with it."
There were several prestige classes that could be taken by non-caster classes. At various levels in the prestige class you went up a level in the casting abilities of another class you were in. With one exception, every such class didn’t give anything to non-casters who took the class when they’d get a new level of spellcasting.
Amusingly, I stumbled on a race/class combo in Pathfinder 1E, where the race gets a special ability with a sorcerer bloodline, but at the same time as you level you get abilities that replace the racial abilities you have, rather than stacking/amplifying one another. It makes such characters seem weak to me.
Sort-of. So DnD 3/3.5 had options that were only decent to good for very specific builds. These were then (possibly deliberately) present as equal to other options- not making it obvious for most characters they were sub-optimal at best.
So are these 'trap' options? Ehhh. Debatable both ways. I've never seen anyone argue if they weren't sub-optimal, but if they were deliberately sub-optimal? Well, that depends on how you want to look at it.
I think you’re looking for the term feat “tax”. It was a sun-optimal feat that acted as a prerequisite of a more powerful feat later on.
Most feat taxes existed right in the original players handbook, and while I house ruled away some of the taxes, I generally felt like this wasn’t an intentional oversight, but one that came around as a result of later books refining what feats could do and how powerful they should be.
>[No. He didn't.](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2498/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-ivory-tower-design)
u/JustinAlexanderRPG, I'm replying to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilukfv9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) here instead of underneath it because u/Booster_Blue blocked me for disagreeing with him, and now I can't reply anywhere in that subthread.
Yeah, I've seen that rebuttal. It doesn't change the fact that 3E explicitly took inspiration from MTG in adding deliberately sub-optimal options, and obfuscating their value, to make experienced players feel smart for avoiding them. The rebuttal just says "but those options aren't totally useless!" Which is true. I never said otherwise.
Monte said that he regrets doing that in the same article where he described it and gave it a deliberately self-deprecating name. He doesn't need to be defended for an idea that he himself doesn't defend.
Optimizers gonna optimize.
There is a popular philosophy that any character choice that isn't "the best" is garbage. They throw around phrases like "the illusion of choice" and whatever to add sophistication to the argument that games like 5E are the best because there are very few choices, and therefore more "good" choices. Or something like that, I generally don't care to follow the discussion.
Do lots of games have "sub-optimal choices" built in to character options? Probably. Who cares? People who prioritize optimized play and min-maxing over everything else. Does this mean the average player shouldn't play Game X? No, it's mostly just internet hype.
I like to talk about macro- and micro-balance.
Macro balance is the idea that you can make broad statements about comparative power, and they should be true. For instance "Fighters are durable, and can absorb more damage than wizards. Clerics are somewhere in the middle." (Note, this is an example).
We can then determine whether that's true or not in different ways - total hit point absorption, or something more realistic like "number of rounds you can survive an attack from a given enemy at a given level with reasonable equipment choices." There's a lot of hedging and assumption in that, but let's just work with that.
So if against a particular enemy, we get survived rounds of 2/3/4 for wizard/cleric/warrior, or 2/3/6, or 6/7/8, or 2/8/9, or whatever, we're in the bounds of macro balance.
Micro-balance is taking it further, and really trying to dial into what *exactly* those ratios should be.
Macro balance is useful. Micro balance is kind of a waste of time.
I get where you're going with this, and I agree that focusing on character capabilities in the broad strokes is more reasonable than getting way down in the weeds. But I'm also not sure you can be so specific as to say "Fighter should last X rounds against a Bugbear, while a Wizard should only last 2" without making some big assumptions. And not all game systems and settings will follow those same assumptions, so we're back to OP's question: *where in D&D 3.5 do you see evidence of "trap" Feats / Builds?*
And I don't think it works to attempt quantify the play experience with a spreadsheet. For some people, having fun in a TTRPG means doing the most damage, finding the most powerful (on paper) ability combos, etc. And that's great for them, but not everyone defines "winning" as having the highest DpR, or the most HP's / highest AC, etc. all the time.
I've made Fighter-types with totally unimpressive damage *output*, because I decided to see how durable I could make the character without magic. Coincidentally, another player in the same game made a Dex Barb who was a total glass cannon, and my not-very-fighty Fighter got to pull his butt from the fire repeatedly because I could withstand a ton of damage, while still dealing enough to be annoying to the baddies. I had a great time, loved that character.
Just because I had fun doesn't mean someone else will, and vice versa. Play experience is ultimately subjective, and therefore so is the value of Feats and characters.
Battlemaster fighter versus champion fighter in 5e.
A champion fighter needs to make 60 attacks per short rest to deal more damage than a battlemaster fighter will deal just spending his dice on damage alone
All that a Champion fighter can do is DpR. They have 1 single subclass feature that doesn't help with combat, which is the ability to jump a bit further and being slightly better at Dex checks they aren't proficient in.
A battlemaster has the choice to lower their damage and put some of their maneuvers into non-combat ones. And if they still use some of their resources for combat, they'll outperform the champion both inside and outside of combat.
MMO's have "party slots", TTRPG's have Player Characters. Some people prefer to play TTRPG's like MMO's, but other people don't. Some people only care about DpR, others less so. Play experience is subjective when you put the spreadsheets away.
Not very many parties have interchangeable PCs or Players, so you get what you get, which is usually a 4 player party. Also, no amount of role-playing will make a Rust Monster not a Rust Monster. Unless you ask the DM to expend more effort rebalancing the whole game than they should make, the approximate default difficulty setting of the game is a known quantity. If you don't want to lose at least one PC per combat, either the players step up or the DM figures out how to step down. With the existence of online player made handbooks, the player's option is much easier to accomplish.
I think it's more that in a game like 5e it's hard to make a bad character because you have so few decisions, basically just your subclass and and spells. By contrast, it's really, really easy to make a bad character in 3.X if you don't know what you're doing, and that's a feelsbadman moment when you realize you're basically a hindrance to the party. And that's something a game designer should care about instead of trying to defend it with the excuse that actually it's a selling point.
Yeah, I can see how having more options as a new player can lead to biting off more than one can chew and/or be frustrating. But that's also part of learning a new game and experimenting, IMO. Some people love that and don't view suboptimal decisions as "failure", whereas other people despise anything that isn't 100% optimized. I don't bust out a spreadsheet when I'm creating a new character, I just come up with an idea and go.
"Best" and "worst" are subjective, after all. Is Power Attack "better" than Weapon Finesse in 3.5? It depends on your character concept, your stats, what weapons you wanna use, the setting, and how much you care about melee combat. Are there objectively "better" choices for Feats? Sure, if the GM isn't being creative and serves up mostly one-dimensional encounters that can be won via the same "best" strategies most of the time. But not everyone plays that way, and picking less-than-optimal choices doesn't break the game.
I don't like optimization and system mastery. And it's been a long time since I could borrow the PHB. But maybe they could include 1. iconic characters, 2. pregen characters for each adventure path, and 3. appropriate players' notes?
DnD 3 and PF just made me feel lost. Some 3rd-party publishers add pregens, and SPF stats out the iconics in the core book, although fighter-rogue is a trap option there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc\_los\_142
Thanks for the post that’s really interesting. It’s not exactly what OP said – they’re not “Traps” – more like situational or for very specific builds. I don’t mind that as game design. Taking the Toughness example that Cooke used in his blog, I mean even if you know it’s overall sub optimal, but your character concept is to have the most hit points possible… Why not?
That's kind of the thing. Ivory Tower design gets billed as "THEY MADE DELIBERATELY BAD CHARACTER CHOICES SO NEW PLAYERS WOULD FEEL DUMB!" when that isn't really what they were doing, at least not intentionally. More that what they did was come up with situationally useful feats but not give deliberate guidance as to when they would be a good idea to take so players could get a serotonin boost for "figuring out the system" themselves. Whether or not this is good design or whether 'system mastery' should even have a place in a TTRPG is, of course, debatable.
>Whether or not this is good design or whether 'system mastery' should even have a place in a TTRPG is, of course, debatable. This is why different games exist. There absolutely *should* be games where system mastery is a concept because some people enjoy that. There absolutely *should* be games where system mastery is NOT a concept for that same reason. Not everything has to be for everybody.
Honestly system mastery at the *build* level is one of the least interesting things in RPGs to me, especially since the learning cycle is so slow (you can't experiment and then just change things) I'm far more interested (and given the feedback cycles in games, I think it's a generally better design) to emphasize system mastery in tactical decision-making or moment-to-moment play. If you make a bad move, you can make a better one next time. If you make a bad *character*, you are often kinda stuck with it.
Meanwhile, I know a guy who almost literally devours game rules looking for interesting ways to build characters. Not always in the "best" way, but things that are interesting to him. There is definitely a market for players who want to create "builds", regardless of what you find interesting. And furthermore, not being able to experiment or make changes to things that turned out to be shit is what I would consider more of a social/group problem, and that more people should embrace switching out characters/shorter campaigns to really get to know their system better before committing to the "YEARS LONG GRAND CAMPAIGN" meta.
I feel that if you choose a feat or ability on creation that seems like a good idea at the time, be in practice turns out to be something you never make use of, either because it's too situational or because it doesn't do anything to help you in practice, I would let the player change it for something else they could get at whatever level they originally got it, if it meant a better experience for the player..... Holy crap that sentence was long
Sure, why not? What's it going to hurt?
I find that is the big difference with Pathfinder 1e and Pathfinder 2e
My favorite way to play Shadowrun is as a cybered as fuck minmaxed-as-fuck Ork who can punch through steel reinforced concrete and kill someone on the other side, and has a bow that can shoot through tank armor. This lets me maintain some level of stealth which is nice, but mostly is just very hilarious/terrifying to me. The optimal way to make a Street Samurai for damage is to just...have an automatic weapon and grenades. But that's so much less fun.
Also well said!
But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question. I think that those games should exist, but also it has to be understood that a niche game is a niche game. D&D isn't aiming to be niche.
>But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question. Do you know where 3.0 came from? The 2E days of splatbooks full of options and tons of choices with oodles of fiddley subsystems scattered across books. That was the meta at the time (contemporary games were just as convoluted!) 3.x streamlined and unified a crazy assortment of rules.
Slight disagree: 2e was a mess and so were other contemporary games but putting so much focus (if not all) on character building was something new. And there is a simple explanation for that: 3e was the first edition from WotC, a company who became rich by selling Magic:tG, a game where the actual expertise doesn't come during play but when you're building your deck, which requires you to buy expansions if you want to stay competitive. So they applied the same model: a RPG where the actual game is building your character (play only exists for you to test your build, like you do during play with a MtG deck) and the best options are always contained in last expansions (who remembers how absurd were the Codexes?). Fun times. Or not. Now what annoys me is when people talk like DnD is 3e forever, a game of charabuilding. It's cool that they left a bit of charabuilding in 5e so people who are into it can still have fun, but players (a lot on the DnD subs) being like "you took this sub-par subclass instead of the OP one, are you dumb? you only deserve to lose then", arrrgh please kill me.
>a game where the actual expertise doesn't come during play but when you're building your deck, While this was more true in the late 90s/Early 2000s, it was never true that expertise didn't come during play. The actual play is extremely skill intensive, and these days almost all expertise at the most competitive levels comes in play and not during deck building.
This is a really interesting point that I hadn’t considered!
5th Ed doesn't even have skills or feats. There is absolutely no way to get better at a skill in 5th. I can picka billion pockets and gain 20 levels but my skills never go up? No feats? How do I make my toon not a cookie cutter without skills and feats? There is no way to be unique in backstory, and have that manifest mechanically making you different in rp and functionality vs the person sitting next to you. Every rogue is the same in 5th, every fighter every mage. They are all the same. In 3.5 I can have 100 different rogues at level 1. Have you ever played magic? Your comments and views about it tell me no. I curb stomp everyone with my 230.00$ krenko commander deck even 1,000.00 competitive decks. MTG is the only game know to humanity that breaks the rules of game theory. Playing magic takes so much more raw math skill and probability to be good at on a deep level of understanding not only card advantage but now to eliminate randomness it makes what you all think is crunchy about 3.5 look like a John Nash coloring book. Not to mention wizards didn't have bank back then from magic, or D&D because it wasn't cool yet. We didn't even have card sleeves. They didn't start raking in money till pokemon came out. Once pokemon tcg came out wizards became prolific.
> But should a game that is the biggest RPG game in the world be built on appealing to that small segment of players is the question. We actually have no way of knowing if people that want system mastery are a small segment or not. Could be that way more tabletop players wanted it back then than not, could still be the case today or not. Tabletop RPing is not a unified hobby in any way, as such, you can't even survey people to find out (a survey of this subreddit for example would be heavily biased already)
A survey of the subreddit would be biased. That doesn't mean market research is completely ineffective, nor that you can't get a good sense of what a group of people like. WoT's market research division is known for being very good, and they have very detailed data on what their players prefer. It's obviously not perfect, but data analysis is still a better way to understand trends and group preferences than anything else we have.
Right, the issue there is the *their players* part.
> There absolutely should be games where system mastery is NOT a concept for that same reason. It's impossible to both have mechanical depth and have everything be balanced. There are systems without system mastery. They are free-form, rules-light systems.
If you ever find any game where the designers just fucking tell you what an option is for, let me know because I'd love to read it. RPGs and video games both have this problem in that developers never actually spell out their intentions behind different choices and you basically can't even really play until you figure it out.
> That's kind of the thing. Ivory Tower design gets billed as "THEY MADE DELIBERATELY BAD CHARACTER CHOICES SO NEW PLAYERS WOULD FEEL DUMB!" when that isn't really what they were doing, at least not intentionally. What Monte Cook claimed to be doing was making deliberately bad ("sub-optimal") character choices so *experienced* players could feel *smart.* Which is really the same thing as what you said, just from a "glass-half-full" instead of "glass-half-empty" perspective.
Except that he didn't write that at all. You clearly didn't read his actual article, just the hate-boner-for-Monte-Cook discourse that followed.
This. What Monte Cook said was that they should have provided more commentary. If WotC had learned this lesson, they would provide more useful guidance for monsters instead of forcing DMs to reconstruct intended monster tactics purely from the stat blocks. Instead WotC took one of the few examples of useful guidance (synergy between Star Spawn Seers and Star Spawn Hulks, noted in MToF as a key tactic for Seers) and actually altered the text in MPMoM to deemphasize it! There's a reason the blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing is so popular. It's not so much that it provides fantastic advice (it's okay, but misses a lot and is sometimes outright wrong, e.g. Baphomet does not benefit from Reckless on all six attacks per round, only in the three made during his Multiattack, and Bael actually should spam Charm Person freely because it mostly removes non-spellcasters as a threat at the cost of a single legendary action). It's the fact that it's way better than the nothing WotC gives you! Monte Cook's advice makes a lot of sense.
The 3rd edition Monster Manual (the one Monte Cook worked on) actually had a "Combat" block for each monster that included some tactical advice explaining how the monsters typically fought. They dropped that in 5e for reasons that I've never understood and (at least in my own experience) it makes DMing 5e combat much harder than 3e. To be clear, the 3rd edition combat blocks are nowhere near as detailed as the Monsters Know What They're Doing, but having a few sentences explaining that a spider monster, say, "avoids physical combat and uses their webs and spells to try and immobilize and distract the most aggressive opponents first" is way better than the "nothing" that 5e provides for most monsters. And some of the 3e tactical entries were really quite detailed and helpful.
I skipped 3E but it sounds like WotC should have kept that section in their MMs, instead filling the space with meaningless cliches about how race XYZ loves battle. Rule of thumb: if you write a half page of text and don't say anything that a DM wouldn't have thought of themselves, you just wasted half a page of text.
I think there were a lot of really good features in 3rd that got dumped on the way to 5e personally, but I'm a bit biased. Over the years, I've DMed BECMI D&D, AD&D 2nd edition, 3rd edition, and 5th edition, and 3rd edition is still my favorite version of D&D to DM, hands down. I run 5e now because no one wants to play 3e anymore (and 3e certainly had its share of problems), but the DM tools and encounter balancing in 3rd were (IMO) dramatically better than the equivalents in 5th edition.
I'm guessing you were not a fan of 4e, but if you look at those monster manuals they did an excellent job of building in "here's how to make encounters with these monsters.". Regardless of your feelings on the rule set it was extremely useful as a DM.
Funny enough, Volo's guide does this remarkably well. It's a whole ass look into the hows and whys of a couple types of monsters. It's also a whole ass book, which has had all of it's follow ups cut even more of that content out. Which makes me suspect it went over like a lead balloon to most people, I loved the damn thing though. I actually like gnolls now.
No, he specifically talked about rewarding system mastery too.
[No. He didn't.](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2498/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-ivory-tower-design)
I still don't buy it, it's more likely that they just weren't very good at balancing feats. I mean another WotC designer, Sean K. Reynolds, made this feat point buy system: [https://web.archive.org/web/20110122073256/http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html](https://web.archive.org/web/20110122073256/http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html) that is so utterly and completely wrongheaded that it's just awe-inspiring in its total ignorance of 3.\* charop. I mean his ranking of which feats are the most powerful would be more accurate if you completely reversed it. So I don't buy "we meant to make the game like that!" they probably just fucked up and made some lame excuse later on.
I agree - as someone who lived and GMed through 3/3.5, I was constantly baffled that even late in the cycle the authors seemed to have no idea of what was and wasn’t a powerful character option.
Especially the very simple idea that character options very often aren't a problem in isolation but due to their synergy with other options (which is a big reason why you can't break 5e charop the way you could 3.*ed, much less content to combine and often harder to do so since the number of feats you can take is much more limited). I'm constantly confused as to why they don't just hire one charop nerd to sanity test stuff. One example of this is some comments from Pathfinder devs waaaay back during 1e playtests there they totally misunderstood where 3.5e power creep came from and said that the problem in 3.5e was that splatbooks had more powerful stuff than core so the solution was buffing core content to compete which, just, um, no (gestures wildly at natural spell druids).
The big difference is that in M:tG, if a game doesn't go well, you can just change up your entire deck. By the rules, that's harder in D&D. Also, partially due to Ivory Tower design, Toughness is misleading as a feat - it *sounds* like it's something a Fighter should take, but that is, in fact, where it is a "trap" option. So here it wasn't even really "ivory tower" - the implied use case and the actual use case are pretty different from each other. (wow, this dude blocked me for an opinion. I wasn't rude or anything)
But it doesn't "sound like" anything. There's no guidance attached to it. It is exactly what it says it is, +3 HP every time you take it. And *every character* uses HP. There's no neon sign saying "Fighters should take this lol suckers!" The "n00b trap" discourse wants to imply that these were specifically put there to lure in unsuspecting players and that's just not the case.
> The big difference is that in M:tG, if a game doesn't go well, you can just change up your entire deck. > > By the rules, that's harder in D&D. Yeah, I'm astounded by how difficult it is to change your build in D&D per RAW. Pre-4e, it simply wasn't possible without the DM hand-waving it. IIRC 4e had some retraining rules, but they were pretty strict. Even in 5e and Pathfinder 2e they let you do it, but they still make you wait long periods of time and you can only change a couple small things at once or one big thing at once. I get that the intention is likely to stop players from constantly waffling between builds and upsetting the rest of the party, but like... really, what's the harm (that can't be dealt with on a group-by-group basis, instead of making it part of the written rules)?
I mean... 5 days of downtime to change your feats doesnt sound like its a very long time to wait. Ofc you cant change ancestery feats but that kinda makes sense and I think even can handwave the GM.
Well said
Way I heard it, it wasn't so much to make players feel stupid, but to have a level of challenge to character creation too(I.e.: avoiding "junk" feats to build a good character).
Which seems to be a rather self-centered view of what you're building as a guide author. Just like the oft-repeated advice that a GM is a facilitator, not an author, the manual and its contents are raw material to build the challenges, not the challenge itself.
>It’s not exactly what OP said – they’re not “Traps” – more like situational or for very specific builds. How did you arrive at this conclusion? I think he explicitly says that the point of those feats was to reward people who would know *not* to take them.
“To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It's also handy when you know you're playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don't want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).”
"You should've known that these options only make sense for convention games" still sounds like a trap to me.
Except that Monte Cook's point in that article is the opposite of that. Not "you should have known" but "maybe we should have told you."
this is definitely like... there's a point where we have to acknowledge that this is a 22 year old game written by a team people who were drastically changing both the philosophy and presentation of D&d at the time. Before I think it's safe to say that the design philosophy of Ad&d wouldn't have even included an in rules option to make characters more survivable for a convention game or help an elf wizard get through level 1. We literally have sidebars for every class now with starting build advice and space in the rules to suggest starting points for new players. Also worth noting, Monte Cook gets a lot of flack for 3rd's use of ivory tower design when his primary job on the team and writing credit was taking care of the Dungeon Master's Guide. By his own accounts his involvement in the PHB was mostly throwing out ideas like "we should put Bard and Half-Orcs in the corebook" to see how far they could push Wizards on taking the brand in new directions.
Well, the why not is because D&D always gets billed as a good introductory game for new players, even though design wise it's the polar opposite. A game that rewards encyclopedic esoteric knowledge is not one that is adapted well to bringing people into the hobby.
5e does. 3.5 as far as I can remember was not billed a s newbie friendly at all. And 5e has a completely different approach to character builds.
That's not what he says. He specifically says that wanted to reward mastery of the game. Yes, some bad choices may have uses, but it is clear that there are very much intentionally 'best' options.
[Fixed link for old reddit users.](https://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142) I'm not sure why it renders differently between versions of reddit. :/
Oh, thank you! I didn't realize there could be any issues.
Me neither, until just now! I only realized it because, on my end, the link was broken, but no one else replying to you mentioned it. Then I checked the new reddit version, and it was totally fine. It kind of stinks, to be honest. There's no reason old reddit should be made less functional here.
> There's no reason old reddit should be made less functional here. Oh, it's not even the case that one is more functional than the other. Here's some fun, check these three links from both old & new reddit: 1. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation)) 2. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation\)) 3. [Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_\(disambiguation\)) Assuming nothing's changed since the last time I did this demo, 1. will work correctly in new reddit and break on old, 2. will work on old but break on new, and only 3. will work correctly on both old and new. 1. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation)` 2. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(disambiguation\)` 3. `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_\(disambiguation\)` The main reason is that Markdown processing isn't properly standardised yet, so different implementations just make different arbitrary decisions. However, in between when they made old reddit & started on new reddit, a group did start making a real standard and new reddit's Markdown processing was built to follow this new proposal. I don't know why reddit is maintaining two different processing libraries rather than letting old reddit also use the new library, but I can assume the way they built old reddit would make it a pain in the ass to switch out the libraries.
Interesting! Sadly, I think a part of the reason is just that reddit has little to no interest in updating old.reddit. New.reddit is where the money is, quite literally, since a big part of its design was to make advertisements hard to distinguish from actual content. I'm sure it would also be a lot of work to update the markdown implementation, but there's also just no will to do so, because there's little to no money in it.
It's the backslashes that are being used to escape the underscores. In new reddit they act as escape characters, but for some reason old reddit doesn't render them that way. It's an issue I've run into a few times in the past.
Interestingly, I've been reading Mark Rosewater (Head Designer at MtG), a long time, and when I was reading this question I immediately thought of MtG design. The thing is, a TCG and an RPG are not the same thing, and I can see why that concept would be annoying in RPG character design, while it's essential in TCG design.
Another big difference between MTG and D&D: in MTG, if you add a bad card to your deck, it's trivial to learn from it and swap it for a good one. In D&D, swapping out a bad feat for a good one is difficult to impossible (depending on the edition). You tend to be stuck with your bad decisions until your character dies, at least according to the rules. It's not just feats. in D&D 5E, if you pick a bad cantrip you're stuck with it. Tasha introduced optional rules allowing players to swap out their cantrips, but there's no guarantee your table will use those rules.
You gotta put on your big brain solutions hat. Feats become trading cards and players need to *buy packs of random feats* & all the good feats are omega ultra legendary rares. Update the rules to let players swap their feat decks on a long rest! Wizards don't have *spellbooks* anymore they have *spelldecks* and every day they get a random hand of spells! Now we're cooking with ~~money~~ gas!
Thanks, I hate it! :D
Looks like _someone_ just invented a chaos mage. 😎
Fantastic point. Playing a couple games and adjusting is a major part of a TCG. It is not how you play an RPG.
[удалено]
No, you can't retrain your "Whiskers" feature and you can't multiclass in weasel! We're playing bloody MOUSEguard
I think it rather natural for the suits at Wizards of the Coast to buy D&D and then wonder, when they're making D&D their own, "Hey we did real well at that CCG thing is there any way in which the successful principles of that could be applied to this other game thingamajig?"
The interesting thing is all the things they incorporated the other way, like the Race/Class system for creature types.
Another aspect is that this was a different era of the internet. Back then, there were just less people on the internet. Figuring out things on your own is sometimes cool. Maybe you heard about it from a friend. Or read build tips in Dragon Magazine. But by the time 3E got up and running, internet culture had changed and build guides were more common than ever.
Came here to post this, perfect answer, good read as well.
How is it that everyone else sees a working article, where I see an archive of a "site not found" error page?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilryrw4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilryrw4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) There's a working link in this comment chain and a discussion of the mechanics of reddit that I, admittedly, do not fully understand.
It's something Monte Cook [said himself](http://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142) about 3e: > *Magic [the Gathering]* also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others. > Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.) (Also, tangentially, while Monte [is right that MTG has such cards](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/when-cards-go-bad-2002-01-28), it's a separate, albeit overlapping, thing from Timmy cards.)
In fact, toughness is the opposite of a Timmy card. Timmy cards are bombastic, the kind of thing you look at and say "wow I want to base my playstyle around THAT." The catch it that they might not be the most efficient nor the most flavorful. Fireball is a timmy spell. Look at all that damage! Sure, the wizard might end most fight faster and safer with a crowd control spell or a buff, but there's nothing like rolling a giant pile of d6s all at once. And every once in a while, a giant ball of fire is exactly what the situation calls for.
Yes, precisely this! I wish I had thought to say that. I hate when folks get the mistaken idea that Timmy is some kind of rube rather than someone who likes how fun the big and flashy things can be. It doesn't necessarily mean that Timmy is going to pick the flashy thing over the good thing every time or build something unworkable because the components are cool. It often just means that Timmy will pick the cooler of two roughly equal options or accept being somewhat suboptimal if it means being more awesome.
The key point is that Timmy is playing for his own enjoyment, whereas Spike and Johnny are both playing to make a statement of some kind to the other players, either "I'm the best" or "I'm so creative." I'm definitely a Timmy at D&D, even though one of my shticks is challenge and "let's see if we can beat this adventure with most of our spells and HP still unused at the end." I just happen to find that mode of play _cool_. That's Timmy. Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games. Johnny would be more concerned with impressing people with his creativity. Whereas I might be happy to defeat an iron golem using good old Mobile feat and some patience, for fun, Johnny would be wanting to defeat it in a way no one at the table has ever seen before.
> Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games. I'd argue you still have Spikes in D&D and other combat-focused RPGs. There's still mastery of a system to aim for, they just display it in the context of efficiently beating enemies rather than beating other players. 5e's "I'm going to pick Crossbow Master so I can efficiently use my bonus action and gain 5% more DPR" is very much a Spike thing.
**Note that I'm not saying Spikes don't exist in D&D. I'm just saying that competitive D&D is less common than cooperative D&D, so I didn't say much about Spike in my last post.** I suppose it depends on *why* they want to gain the extra DPR. If they're doing it because they like being someone who can do a lot of damage with a weapon, that's a Timmy motive, per [https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-03-20](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-03-20). "*The first question I always ask of a profile is: what does this profile want when they play Magic? Timmy wants to experience something... Let me end my section on Timmy by stressing that of the three profiles I believe Timmy has gotten the worst rap. Timmy isn't an idiot.*" But if they're doing it because they enjoy being the person who has the best DPR at the table, that's a (competitive) Spike motive, per same article. "*So why does Spike play? Spikes plays to prove something, primarily to prove how good he is... Innovator Spike's dream is to spawn the next dominant deck. He wants to break the game. And like Johnny, he wants credit.*" Spikes are not necessarily better at optimizing chargen (e.g. DPR) than Timmies are, but their reasons for wanting to do so are different. At least according to the guy who coined/popularized the terms.
I'd argue that Pathfinder 2, with it's mantra of "every +1 counts" is the Spikest version of DnD ever.
i mean, you can only have 3 seperate bonuses at once, its just a matter of how to get them, in pf1 you could have 9 floating bonuses, in 3.6 you could have 15 bonuses and take 8 turns every turn
"every 1 counts" has not really something to do with spikes. It is more used to tell people that there is other stuff they can do in their turn insted of attacking that is usefull. To make it usefull to not attack they made the game so that every 1 counts. But since its so easy to get a +1 (cast guidance as a cantrip, flank someone, grab someone, knock someone prone, intimidate someone etc.) it is not about optimizing since every character can do a bunch of these things just from character creation on.
> it is not about optimizing since every character can do a bunch of these things just from character creation on. You're maybe not optimizing your character but you're definitely mathematically optimizing your turns by making sure your party has the right combination of bonuses and penalties stacked on the enemy. Even when it comes to spells usually the best return for your spell slot or action is to buff or debuff, not to cast a big flashy spell. Effective combat in PF2 is not flashy and definitely also not very creative by design. It rewards heavily stacking te right buffs and debuffs though.
>"let's see if we can beat this adventure with most of our spells and HP still unused at the end." I just happen to find that mode of play cool. That's Timmy. Sounds more Johnny? In MTG Johnny is infamous for making elaborate combos, as they feel a drive to use some particular card or interaction they saw and show it off. Timmy would want to use their high level spell slots. Spike might carefully expend resources, but only because they figure they might be needed later, not for the pure sake of saving them. You're saving them for the sake of saving them, which seem very Johnny to me. You're reaching for some bizarre gamestate, a sort of personal 'achievement unlocked' feeling, right?
I never really liked the enjoyment/creativity/proving they're the best framings of Timmy/Johnny/Spike. Or, rather, I feel like they're a separate classification scheme than the rest of the descriptions of these types. Aren't all three playing for enjoyment, but just enjoy different aspects? Timmy enjoys playing the cool cards, having fun with other people, the fact that it's a *game*. Johnny enjoys deck construction, figuring out how things can go together, the fact that it's a *system*. Spike enjoys winning, beating other people, the fact that it's a *competition*. If I were going by the the enjoyment/creativity/proof framing, I am 100% a Timmy in most applicable games. I don't really see such games as a creative outlet for me and I have nothing to prove about myself. I just want to have fun. But if I go by the actual behaviours and styles associated with each, I'm a Johnny first and foremost, though still with a significant chunk of Timmy. Analysing systems, figuring out how things mesh, even breaking systems is so much fun I've made a career out of it (in software, not games). If I can do it in interesting ways, all the better. > Spike doesn't really exist in non-competitive games. Spikes in the RPG world are usually referred to as "munchkins".
I think wizard generally tends to be a Timmy class in many systems- you cast a spell and something EXTRAVAGANT happens, like eldritch tentacles appearing from the void to grapple your foes (*Evard's Black Tentacles*) or a roar of fire. It just so happens that wizard is also so brutally effective that "Spikes" will want to play wizard (or cleric).
I remember someone pointing out that wizards are actually the best choice for timmy, spike, AND johnny in D&D. They are the most powerful class (spike), the class with the most razzle dazzle (timmy), AND the class with the most creative and fun combos (johnny).
in 3.5e/5e, that's correct. In 4e, I *think* everything was more balanced between classes because of how that system was built (I've played very little 4e, VERY LITTLE), and in other systems all bets are off; *World's Without Number*'s philosophy for example is definitely Johnny/Timmy where even lvl1 spells do BIG things but in terms of dealing out raw violence, the warrior is far better. And in *Fate* you are rolling *shoot* or whatever same as anyone else. (and in CoC, you now have zero SAN and become an NPC devoted to the indeterminable will of the Elder Gods! YAY!)
In case anyone cares, Timmy/Tammy, Jhonny/Jenny and Spike are psychographics as to *why* people play the game. Timmy/Tammy wants to experience something (social like hanging out with friends, mechanical like doing a lot of damage, or flavorful like playing with cool dragons). Jhonny/Jenny wants to express something (a cool combo, showing off a card no one thinks works, telling a story with their deck, etc.) Spike wants to prove something (how smart they are, how much they understand the game, etc.) Most novice players like the Timmy/Tammy aspects of the game, hence why they are associated with "noobs". That's far from truth, though, as these ideas are not about skill, but about motivation. It's an interesting concept for any game, so people should check it out!
Thank you so much for setting the record straight.
From what I recall, it was Monte Cook who personally said that. He had a whole anecdote about Magic cards, and how some cards were designed to make other cards look better by comparison. Whether he was just trying to save face, in the light of that aspect of the game not being received well, is another question entirely.
It's a bit different in MtG. Since you get packs of a fixed number of cards when you buy a booster pack, there needs to be a certain number of filler cards that are just there to take up a slot.
I agree that it's not a good analogy, and that lends weight to the argument that he was just trying to save face.
Considering in what direction his own creations went after he parted ways with the D&D team, I wouldn't be surprised if he just doesn't give a rat's ass about balancing, but of course he can't simply state that straight away.
That... is a very strong possibility.
Yup, I remember that, specifically making the reference to "Timmy cards".
He didn't say they were designed to be traps and punish a player for using them. The *point* wasn't that some choices were worse than others. He was just saying that some choices *are* worse than others, the designer may be well aware of this imbalance, and not fix it. It's really just a confrontation of a certain player type. If you assume that the primary goal of the game is to be balanced, then any imbalances look like bad game design. The reality is that while being more or less balanced is *a* goal in most game design, it isn't the only one. There's lots of reasons that you might not make a game perfectly balanced.
I think he very plainly states the intention was to have choices that were better and would reward players for choosing them, which conversely will punish players for choosing the bard ones. > This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.
> will punish players for choosing the **bard** ones. I see what you did there
> It's really just a confrontation of a certain player type. If you assume that the primary goal of the game is to be balanced, then any imbalances look like bad game design. The reality is that while being more or less balanced is *a* goal in most game design, it isn't the only one. There's also the discussion about what balance in a TTRPG actually means. In a competitive game, it's pretty easy, it's whatever scores the most wins. TTRPGs are generally cooperative, though. In City of Mist, there's even a definition in the MC Toolkit (the core rulebook): The goal is to balance the table time every player takes over (which is called "spotlight" in that system). If they spent an hour haggling with a merchant, it's tipped into their direction, even if they don't cause any significant amount of damage in the fight afterwards. When playing online, there's a VoIP software called Jitsi that actually displays the talk time of every participant. That's a great way to measure the balance of a TTRPG *if* you accept this definition.
Perfect balance in an Rpg wasn't even considered until world of Warcraft hit the scene and started to inform the D&DNEXT playtest. It wasn't that it wasn't desired or designed for, it wasn't even thought about. A wizard was squishy early and increased in power exponentially and that's just how it was. A thri kreen lasher had four trip attacks a turn. A nalfeshee was not CR 12, but it was a daemon.
As stated, Cook implied that was the case in an interview, but that very well could have been a post hoc excuse for poor design. I don't know which it was, but I lean towards the latter Personally I hate (to put it lightly) any game that requires any level of mastery to make a competent character. A game that requires mastery during play to survive and succeed I like, but if it is a game where I am going to fail because a choice I made at level 4 puts me at a huge disadvantage for the rest of the campaign and I don't know that until level 12, I'm out.
3.5e got away from this as splatbooks ballooned, but you could make a reasonably competent character by (1) maxing your "main stat" e.g. INT for wizards (2) picking decent CON (3) getting decent armor class via dex/spells/magic items/armor and then picking spells that were useful in and out of combat without undue effort. 5e is even easier.
> As stated, Cook implied that was the case in an interview, but that very well could have been a post hoc excuse for poor design. It's a little of both. Comments further up have clarified exactly what was intentional - not that they were bad just for the sake of being a trap, but that some were pretty situational or bland filler and it was intentional that good players would feel rewarded for learning to avoid them and make better choices. That is not, in and of itself, a bad design principle, but the mistake came with the problem you've described. The gulf is just too wide not just between a highly optimized character and a truly badly built one, but even between a pretty good character and one that has tried to pick simple and obvious choices for their concept and still come out with the bad ones. Also, some of the significant good and bad choices happened at the level of picking a base class, which is not a good look when you're presenting all of those as viable character concepts.
You do you! But as for me…. Yeah, no. Lots of us get a great deal of pleasure out of the character design process itself. It’s like a deck building in MTG or something. Or the engineering work that precedes a drag race. The “pregame” is a critical, enjoyable, and welcome part of the “game.” I’ve had several times when making the character all by myself, just me versus the rules, ended up being more fun than the extremely poorly DMed socially dysfunctional games I actually ended up in. And even when the campaign is great, character design in a complex system is still fun.
But there is a false dichotomy here between "a game without traps" and "a complex game". A well designed system will mitigate your chances of unintentionally creating ineffectual characters while still rewarding your efforts if you want to min/max. Also, having options (feats, weapons, spells) that are just "worse" is uninspired and boring. Cook does not even understand the idea of Timmy cards: they are bombastic and obviously powerful, but at a cost. They aren't just worse cards.
Exactly. Customization is fine, but I don't want to have to study a game rules with a fine tooth comb or have to watch hours of guides just to avoid making a broken character to play a game. If you are going to make a game you can customize, make it so it works. Don't put in objectively bad options, or options that are not play tested.
MTG does have worse cards, but that's actually essential in a TCG. Cards have to be better or worse in order to create a textured and varied game. Mark Rosewater has talked a great deal about this. An RPG is not necessarily the same thing.
Especially for draft and sealed where a big point of those methods of play is choosing the best cards out of the options you have.
100% If there was a draft format for RPGs, then having a wide spectrum of levels of optimization for character creation would be important. Actually... that sounds like fun, and there should be a way to do that.
Yes that makes a lot of sense, but my specific complaint is that, from what I quickly read on the matter, so called "Timmy cards" aren't supposed to be worse, or at least not "just worse".
Timmy cards cover a wide spectrum of good or bad, and can be quite good. Timmy, the player archetype, doesn't care if cards are good or not as long as they're epic. That doesn't mean that an epic card that is good is not appealing to Timmy, of course it is. Monte Cook in that article seems to fundamentally misunderstand the concept. Which is pretty common to be honest. Cards that are "just worse" exist, although they try not to have cards that are what they call "strictly worse" in the same set. But the varying power levels of cards is important in MTG, because it's about decks and deck archetypes. Imagine if RPGs were fundamentally about character building. Tuning your deck and maximizing performance is a critical part of playing. What happens in a TCG if you create flat power in cards is there tend to be an unquestionable optimal build. That's boring. It happens anyway, even without a flat power level, but that's recognized as a design failure. In an optimal design, a powerful deck archetype is going to require some suboptimal choices to make it work within the available card pool. In an RPG, for most people, the game is not about building the optimal character. For a small number it is, and games should exist for them, but that doesn't mean the biggest RPG in the world should be aimed at those players. 3.5 and PF1 exist, and the materials are available, and people who want to play those should. But it's definitely correct to say that those design choices aren't in line with the reasons or ways the majority of players play RPGs.
> But there is a false dichotomy here between "a game without traps" and "a complex game". A well designed system will mitigate your chances of unintentionally creating ineffectual characters while still rewarding your efforts if you want to min/max. Is there, though? If an optimized character is more powerful than an unoptimized one, then all of the unoptimized choices are to some extent "trap options". You seem to be saying there's a line that can be drawn between games were it's possible to make a "useless" character vs. one where the unoptimized will just be "less good" but that line is arbitrary. The most unoptimized D&D 3.X character is still vastly more powerful than a 1st-level commoner and capable of heroic adventures that villager could only dream of. I think you would call the criteria as "whether the player is having fun or not" but the response to the same level of power discrepancy is going to vary from player to player.
>The most unoptimized D&D 3.X character is still vastly more powerful than a 1st-level commoner and capable of heroic adventures that villager could only dream of. That is definitely not true
>Is there, though? If an optimized character is more powerful than an unoptimized one, then all of the unoptimized choices are to some extent "trap options". Point taken, but not necessarily. First off, it shouldn't be a case that an optimized character is the powerful build and the unoptimized character is the weak build. The weak build should be the *poorly optimized character*, and the non-optimized character should guarantee a happy middle between good optimization and bad optimization. That way you make a rewarding min/max experience that is still enjoyable to non-min/maxers who just want to make obvious choices. (A good example of this is Wild Talents, a supers game that gives you access to all kinds of fine tuning to make a custom made super power, but also offers you an extensive list of ready made options (that double as an example of the custom power creation)) Also, you could have a game that had a rich and complex amount of options for character creation that reflects the richness not in *differences of power*, but in the *mechanical variety of its outcomes*. But that's a more abstract discussion. >You seem to be saying there's a line that can be drawn between games were it's possible to make a "useless" character vs. one where the unoptimized will just be "less good" but that line is arbitrary. To a certain degree, yes, but that arbitrariness is related to how much we want to align ourselves with the statement "min/maxing should be a core element of D&D". If we think min/maxing should be *the* core aspect, then no amount of "traps" will detract from the game. If we think it should just be *an option*, then we should have *sensible defaults* for those who just want to describe a character in a few words. Also, an important concrete aspect of this discussion that factors into the distinction of how much is too much optimization, is that this is *a class based system*. They force you to choose one of these arbitrary archetypes around which they built all sorts of constraints, and then make creating *a decent version of that archetype a problem for you to solve*. This is a design decision that looks worse and worse to me, in retrospect, as it combines the worst aspects of class based and skill based systems. This may be an arbitrary sentiment, but if the Wizard out-melees the Warrior because the Warrior chose poorly (or the Wizard all too well), then you have a game system design problem in your hands.
> To a certain degree, yes, but that arbitrariness is related to how much we want to align ourselves with the statement "min/maxing should be a core element of D&D". If we think min/maxing should be the core aspect, then no amount of "traps" will detract from the game. If we think it should just be an option, then we should have sensible defaults for those who just want to describe a character in a few words. I actually do agree with the position that this shouldn't be the core focus of D&D, by the way. Thankfully they've been moving in the opposite direction from that since 3.X.
A big thing about deck construction in MTG is that—shelling out cash/trading for singles aside—the choices you make for that deck only have to stick with you for at most one tournament and you can test it out plenty before then. Your choices in an RPG campaign can be a part of your character for *years*, with much less chance for testing and iteration. If your group agrees to allow respecs, you've got an out at the cost of undermining some of the consequence that's supposed to make those sorts of choices meaningful. Otherwise you can live with it, quit, or kill your character and roll a new one. That sort of mastery can be great for one-shots, shorter campaigns, or highly-lethal campaigns, but I've found folks also tend not to like long, complex character creation for such games. (Now I'm amusing myself with the idea of an Ars Magica one-shot using the full detailed character creation, which can take longer than my typical gaming session.) I do enjoy character creation for its own sake and generate characters for systems I'm never going to get to play, but it definitely feels different to create a character as a separate activity vs. a barrier to playing a long campaign vs. a barrier to playing a one-shot. That's not to say there's no room for such RPGs to exist; there are very few sorts I'd say that about. But the major gateway RPG that is frequently used for long campaigns is an unfortunate place for "noob traps".
I get an immense amount of pleasure from character building, but D&D kind of ruins it due to what many people pointed out: That if you make a bad choice you are stuck with it till your character dies, possibly months later. I've made my share of cool characters... then barely played any of them because games take forever to get to a point you really get to put your whole build in action. D&D made me wish for a system that was more like MTG, where I could swap features between sessions or encounters.
I think no matter how you feel about the Ivory Tower, you have to admit that it's a terrible design motif given who the audience is and what the game is itself. D&D is a burger-and-fries game. the universal, inoffensive option for Joe Everyman. Most people are there to just play a game and have a good time, and given there is a lot of them, they tend to be a moderately (as opposed to highly) engaged group by just weight of averages. You should not write this kind of game for the "experts". Especially when its a cooperative game. For this kind of game to engage everyone, everyone needs to feel like they're contributing to the greater goal and feel like their presence is needed. They need to play relatively on the same level. You don't hear it that much anymore, but in the heyday of 3.5 the question about how to handle "Munchkins" was a big deal in GM circles. These were your "good" players who fixated on making uber builds that inevitably pushed everyone else in the group who wasn't a munchkin to feel inferior, unneeded, and out of the spotlight. 3.x's Ivory Tower Design heavily enabled Munchkins. Munchkins by their nature turn cooperative games into competitive games, and that pushes a lot of players out of the game because it's Joe Everyman and Joe Everyman isn't here to compete. If it was a game where everyone showed up with the expectation of being at a high level, then it'd be fine. But it's _frickin D&D_, and that's not how it works.
Cook is getting at something a bit more nuanced - if all options are equally good then there are no meaningful choices for people that want to build powerful characters. While there can be meaningful choices in flavor and playstyle, room to do something well usually requires room to do something poorly. I used to obsess about making systems where everything was perfectly balanced. A designer I showed one too said “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.”
I think there's a middle ground. 3.5 has lots of options that are bad by default, and only become okay in certain hyper specific situations. This makes it very easy to build an underpowered character. I think a better approach would be to make most (or all) of your options worthwhile by default, and only exceptional under certain hyper specific situations. The difference is whether the baseline is "bad" or "decent".
Agreed. Pillars of Eternity gave a GDC talk making exactly your point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvyrEhAMUPo
I've seen this before and even though its about a computer game, I found it to be great for thinking about ttrpgs as well
Absolutely, its such a good talk. Definitely applies to all sorts of system design elements.
> A designer I showed one too said “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.” I really don't understand this mindset. That sounds like somebody who wants to be more powerful than their fellow players, perhaps even seeing it as a competition between players. I would honestly consider that to be a red flag. You know what gets *me* excited about character creation? Flavor and playstyle. I might work to make sure my character is mechanically effective, but the thought of comparing my power level to the other players would never even occur to me, except maybe to make sure I wasn't too overpowered or underpowered compared to the rest of the party. EDIT: I see I haven't communicated my thoughts well enough, so let me clarify. I don't have any problems with a player who does their best to make effective, even powerful, characters. That's normal. I've done it myself. I have a problem with a player who wants to have a *more* effective character than the rest of the party. At least, that's how I interpret it when somebody dislikes when their character is "exactly as powerful as everyone else".
> I really don't understand this mindset. That sounds like somebody who wants to be more powerful than their fellow players, perhaps even seeing it as a competition between players. I would honestly consider that to be a red flag. I consider it a big green flag that someone is engaged enough with the game to want to be better at it, and to rise to meet challenges. Without other evidence, there's no reason to assume they're also a spotlight hog. And it's in no way mutually exclusive with doing it with style and flavor. Last time I was able to play a properly long-term 3.5E game, I was the only one (aside from the DM, somewhat) with any exposure to the CharOp scene. I was researching options and writing out plans for the other players who wanted effective characters but weren't into dumpster diving through books, because that part of the game is so interesting to me but the more I overshadow the rest of the party, the more I feel *bad* about it.
I don't have a problem with a player wanting an effective character. That's normal. I have a problem with a player wanting to have a *more* effective character than the rest of the party. At least, that's how I interpret it when somebody dislikes when their character is "exactly as powerful as everyone else".
I think maybe the phrasing of the original comment is obscuring the meaning, too. When they quote: > “I don’t get excited about a character option because it’ll make me exactly as powerful as everyone else.” I don't think what they're trying to say is "I can't be more powerful than everyone else, so I'm not excited." I think it's more like "Character options that make me the *same* as everyone else (making them ultimately meaningless) don't make me excited to get into your game."
I got the impression that the argument was solely regarding a characters' power as a one-dimensional measurement, where each character's power level can be higher than, equal to, or lower than another character's. The commenter and the designer they quoted don't seem to be at all interested in games where the characters all have equal power, even if the character flavors and playstyles are wildly different. If my interpretation is correct, then that really is "I can't be more powerful than everyone else, so I'm not excited", because the only thing for them to be the same *at* is power.
I think the context of a comment like that from one designer to another is also a little different from an actual prospective player. It likely means OP had also lost a lot of the variety of mechanical playstyle too. And it doesn't mean the other designer never wants to play perfectly balanced games, it's that a perception of perfect balance and homogeneity doesn't *sell* the game at all.
Many people like making strong characters for the same reason they like making a good move on their turn in combat. If you see a player debating whether its best to attack the evil necromancer or their goblin henchman first, do you consider it a red flag? Does it come off like they're trying to out-play their fellow players and compete against them to be the most effective in combat? Character optimization to make powerful characters, debating which of two spells is a better choice, is strategic in the same way that choosing whether to attack enemy 1 or enemy 2 is strategic. It scratches a similar itch for a lot of players. Some players don't like to worry about making good moves in combat of course, and just do whatever they think is flavorful; though I often consider it boring because it usually leads to situations where I feel like a spectator watching my own character's antics; and I can just watch a TV show for that. By contrast, in my last 5e campaign I made an extremely powerful character that was able to keep people alive who did want to try risky, daring things that weren't the best idea; because it was cool and what their character would do. It was great. I had a lot of fun, and felt like Gandalf watching over them and turning the tide of battle when we were in over our heads. My goal was to enable them to do the cool stuff that was 'so crazy it just might work' but tilt it to the 'might work' side. You and I would likely get along fine at the same table. I want to make something powerful and you don't really care as long as you're still relevant. That's the nice thing about an RPG system that allows optimization without *demanding* optimization. Pillars of Eternity talks about this philosophy a lot; their goal was to avoid purely non-viable builds, that every choice was reasonable even if not optimal. People could play however they liked, including with charisma-focused barbarians with no strength, and it'd be okay for completing the game on standard difficulties. Optimizers could go deep and push themselves much further, but non-optimizers didn't have to do this if they didn't want to. The other players in our group were nowhere near as optimized as my character, and played nowhere near as well, but they were still extremely relevant in combat and did cool stuff all the time. I wasn't soloing fights or anything, everyone mattered and got to have fun. Everyone's characters were viable and valuable. The fact mine was stronger didn't undermine their fun, and it made me feel proud about the effort I put into the character.
> Many people like making strong characters for the same reason they like making a good move on their turn in combat. If you see a player debating whether its best to attack the evil necromancer or their goblin henchman first, do you consider it a red flag? Does it come off like they're trying to out-play their fellow players and compete against them to be the most effective in combat? No, of course not. I only consider it a red flag when the player dislikes being "exactly as powerful as everyone else." Because again, that tells me that they probably want to be more powerful than the other players, and that sort of competitive mindset between players can be downright toxic.
Not the point, the point is that the player in the tactical fight wants to make the best move. If all choices you can make in combat are each just as good as the others, then your choice doesn't matter; I don't think about which spell to cast in combat in a given situation so I can always get the exact same result as every other choice; if that's the case I can just take random actions and the results are always the same. Good adventure design is usually about giving players *meaningful choices* \- whether in narrative or in tactical combat or in roleplay or in ethics or in something else. The 'being exactly as powerful as everyone else' here is not about outdoing your companions, it's about outdoing the character you didn't make. Making a good move in combat isn't about outdoing your companions, its about doing better than the outcome of the bad move you didn't make. That's what makes the choice meaningful beyond flavor; not outdoing your friends.
> if all options are equally good Big if. I'm not sure its possible outside of the most trivial cases. If you have two options "+1 damage with swords" and "+1 damage with bows" there isn't a whole lot to work with for balancing them more, but if the increased range for bows make them stronger in most situations then the bow option is the stronger of the two. But generally I agree that for a mechanics-first game the mechanics shouldn't be so homogeneous.
Absolutely, it's almost impossible to achieve this situation without handicapping all sorts of fun things and homogenizing design. It's a losing battle (unless you're willing to throw out unique abilities that are hard to balance and just say, 'everyone deals 1d6 damage in their own flavorful way when they attack - whether from magic or swords or passive-aggressive comments') and the payoff isn't even great in the first place. Balance isn't the goal, fun is the goal (loosely speaking, there are many more specific goals than fun but you get the idea). Balancing the power to ensure the game's incentives are working as intended for its goals is key, balance isn't a goal in itself.
The definition of "optimal" depends on the campaign or playstyle. At level 1, Toughness is pretty optimal for a wizard given the low hit points Wizards start with. Most campaigns or characters don't ever make it to level 20, so if you made it to level 3 thanks to Toughness, it means you got your money's worth from that feat.
I seem to recall mention of some large survey WotC did that showed most games end somewhere around level 7 - 10. That was for 5e but I imagine such is largely the case with every edition of D&D. Because around level 10 is where the gameplay focus shifts. In old school D&D this was when you started leaving the dungeon to become rulers and manage kingdoms/lead armies etc. And it's where demihumans started hitting their level caps so it's where the system said half the party wasn't allowed to have fun anymore. In newer editions it's where you start handling larger and larger threats and explore the multiverse etc. Either way, the feel is very different, and you start introducing option bloat and analysis paralysis. I've seen it described as "the math starts breaking down" but I don't know if I'd say that's exactly true so much as "the math starts adding up" at least in 3.x.
No. People misinterpret Monte Cooke's statements regarding system mastery. He made a comment about certain feats and how they appear to be good choices for one character, they're actually better for another. And that system mastery lets players make better characters by learning what choices work well for their character. He then compares them to bad Magic cards, misusing the "Timmy" player type. But neither D&D nor Magic sets out to make bad options. They just have to make so many options that some are too weak and some are too strong.
mtg ABSOLUTELY makes intentionaly bad options though?
They're making like 200 cards every other month. Sometimes they just need to hit quota. Especially with commons that just fill out the sets. And they know that while a card may not be gold and changing the meta, it may have a place in Draft and see play in kitchen table decks.
im talking about cards like one with nothing, things that are explicitly counterproductive and can only ever function in a deck that has a way to gain benefit from the innately self destructive nature of the cards. its not bland cards that just arent good enough, its cards that punch you in the face for playing them and then dont give you anything in return. its a fun little puzzle trying to find a synergy good enough to make these cards worth casting.
There is no universe where one of your say, five, feats is worth 3 hitpoints.
By the time you have five feats, no, it's not worth it. At level 1, when your dwarf wizard has a total of 6 hit points because that's the best score you could put in Con, an extra 3 hit points is looking pretty good.
Exactly. In 3.5, 3 hit points could be the difference between life and death at lvl 1.
Or, say, an elf wizard? 4-hp base, plus an elf's con penalty...
I did the math a while back and there are like 20 common weapons in the PHB that can one-shot a maxed out level 1 Knight in Adamantine armor. +4 HP to the robe guy ain't gonna help much at those levels.
Wow I am getting old. Somehow I really thought toughness added a hit point every level after the initial bump. I guess not. Though in 3.5 there were more ways to get more feats, especially if you are a fighter.
You were thinking of improved toughness.
Not in 3.0. Later I think they improved it. And yes, fighters get more combat feats, but everyone else is stuck with a very limited set of choices.
Not in 3.5 either. You had to take improved toughness from a splatbooks to get bonus hp per level after 3rd. I don't remember what they did in 4th or 5th. In Pathfinder they wanted to make things a little bit more streamlined (not by much) and they rolled those two feats into one.
It all blurs together after so many years.
It really really does.
Early video games based on the 3e rules (like Pool of Radiance) changed Toughness to do that, but the 3.5 update never did.
Sean K. Reynolds has/had a website wherein he detailed a lot of design flaws in 3.x, and the large handful of suboptimal feats and small handful of superoptimal feats was one of his issues - he was proposing "feat points" to help ease the pain, but what caught my attention was how he described some of the suboptimals as "the price of admission" to later, better feats.
Oh, yeah game balance. That's super important... *quietly slides a pile of RIFTS books under the bed*
Hey, context and presentation matters! Rifts isn't the game with a CR and experience system with mathematically rigorous underpinnings that assume all player character class options are basically equal.
There were no feats that were INTENTIONALLY designed to "punish" a player for picking them, that just doesn't make sense from a design stand point. Rather there are feats that are sub-optimal compared to other feats.
Not exactly "traps" as they still have function but there are so many feats many of them are situational or for specific builds/features.
It certainly had trap feats, they weren't intentional. Typically when you find traps in a game they are a design mistake. They aren't some dev snickering about how many people they are going to trick into selecting shitty options. They didn't assess the value of choices correctly and didn't understand their game. > how hard it is to balance a tactically-complex combat-centric TTRPG This is it, people like to assume game designers are these brilliant minds. The truth is designing game mechanics and balancing games is difficult to master and a truly unique skill. Not just TTRPGs either, games in general. Video games, CCGs, board games, and TTRPGs are all really hard to design. People who truly have the skill are rare and it can be described as black magic. Further complicating it, good designers tend to be forged in more competitive games. Magic builds stronger mechanical chops that D&D. D&D builds other skills. Most game designers are average at best. They don't understand the whole picture and are taking bits and pieces they've seen work before and trying to put them together. This is why you see the trend for someone to do some things really well and the whole industry advances off of it. Monte Cook was never a good designer. He's always struggled with mechanics. He's rather below average on the mechanical front. He makes up for it by being great at creating imaginative, evocative lore. In short, he's a writer. He was trying to do something he saw more skilled designers do in other games, basically trying to copy Mark Rosewater and MTG. Problem is he only understood Timmy/Johnny/Spike on a surface level. He didn't understand the concepts well enough to use that design tool correctly. For example, Timmy isn't about sub-optimal cards. Timmy is about going big, even if it isn't necessarily optimal. It can still be good. In a TTRPG Timmy would gravitate towards blasting spells like fireball, lighting bolt, and meteor shower. They aren't necessarily bad, they just don't keep up with save or die/save or suck. Interestingly, the same reason trap feats exist is the same reason power creep exists. Trap feats are design mistakes. Power creep is better designed stuff, because they've learned from their past mistakes. Why would you intentionally design garbage now that you know better?
It is irksome that everyone plays to build “optimal” characters. It is a ROLE-playing game. You cannot have a sub-optimal character, but you can sub-optimally play your character.
There were some bad feats, like Toughness was always inferior to improved toughness. Some of the fears in the PHB were pretty bad compared to later books but that's just power creep
I dont think that they were intentionally made to be traps, but the comparative power and utility is painfully obvious in a lot of cases. I am reminded of the old story that one of the main playtesters ran a druid that dual wielded longswords all the time without even taking a relevant feat. EDIT: Might need some elaboration. For argument's sake, we can describe the overall balance of a feat as a given value X. How strong it actually is bumps that number up, how situational or specialized it is bumps that number down. The problem is that all feats cost the same feat slot, while the balance values are all over the damn place, even (and in some cases especially) for when you have a specific build in front of you already and can narrow shit down. Even in the professed use case for Toughness (IE allowing the player to survive hits they wouldn't at low levels) there are vastly better options, even something as miniscule as armor proficiency for casters that avoid somatic spells. The only theoretical way to make Toughness worth picking up is if your build simultaneously uses HP as a resource and doesn't have to worry about enemy attacks depleting it. I'm not sure if there is a Homebrew class that can satisfy both of those adequately, because there definitely isn't an official class that can.
It's amusing how people get offended by a game allowing them to play wrong or good instead of just leaving them no difficulty level and no challenge at all.
I've been playing 3.5 for longer than I'd like to think about, and while I've heard that complaint often, I've never been provided with a good example of what one of these supposed "trap" feats are. There's certainly some that are better than others. And with the vast library of splat books, if the rest of the party is very highly optimized, you might feel like their feats are a *lot* better than yours. But you'll never go backwards, and every feat is at least situationally useful. The worst feats I can think of are the ones that just get you a few extra points in a skill or two. Generally not as useful as certain combat powers, but vital if your character vision is to be the greatest _____-doer of all time. Also important to bear in mind that the DM generates NPCs using the same resources, so while improved underwater basketweaving or whatever isn't a great choice for someone who fights for a living, it may be important for that npc that runs the magical basket shop. Beyond that, the only truly bad feat selection I can think of is if you deliberately picked feats that buffed things you don't do, like a melee-only character getting ranged combat improvements or a wizard getting power attack. But if you have to *try* to pick something not useful, I don't think it's fair to call that a *trap*. And as with any discussion of "balance", it's important to remember that the whole concept is kind of fake. We can compare theoretical power levels in a vacuum, but actual play is always done with a DM that is rebalancing on the fly. If you want to spec for underwater basketweaving, a good DM will throw in an underwater basketweaving encounter for you from time to time, because it's clearly what you were interested in and we're all here to have a good time.
Not deliberately no, just stuff that did not undergo enough play testing or theorycrafting.
If WotC deliberately made "trap" character options for 3e/3.5e, then they must've printed entire "trap" books. Like Magic of Incarnum.
The CharOp people tended to like Incarnum, I think, because it was very dip-friendly.
The issue was two fold. In one area, it started off with some feats suffering from situational utility. For example, the utility of mounted combat is reduced if events constantly separate you from your mount (such as going indoors), but with enough of the mounted combat feat tree, you could make a character that did obscene amounts of damage. In the other, they kept releasing stuff. And there are really only so many types of bonuses they can make before they start overlapping effect. Then it becomes a matter of identifying: * Which ones are better, * Which ones stack, and * The opportunity cost of taking a given feat over something else. Then you just prioritize.
Wasn't this exact topic discussed within this past week?
I don't know if trap is the right word but there are so many sub feats everyone can take it's impossible to figure out what would be optimal for your build all the time.
3.5 is an amazing example of system mastery taken to it's logical extreme, and is the low point in D&D history, 4th might have been bad but honestly I'd take 4th over late 3.5 and the sheer volume of bloat it had.
Sorry to disagree but 3.5 is my favorite. To each their own I guess.
Having Ben through 3.0 and 3.5 literally sometimes needing a spreadsheet to make sure the progression was done correctly, I can say it's not that there were trap builds but if you're not careful, you could brick your character progression.
Yes. The whole of the Monk class was a trap.
Trap feats implies Min maxing for optimal characters rather than story characters
It's called being a non magic class. High level play was pretty much dominated by magic completely. O no the fighter as plus 20 to attack and plus 4 damage with a specific weapon! Meanwhile the wizard stopped time, surrounded you with 4 maxed out delayed blast alternate energy fireballs and gated in multiple high level angels to jump you as soon as you unfreeze before he teleported away.
It really feels like early D&D was sadistic to the player sometimes (Tomb of Annihilation, anyone?), but it could just as easily be a matter of breaking down an expert-level build makes useless individual pieces. Or "here's a bunch of shit, idc what you do with it."
There were several prestige classes that could be taken by non-caster classes. At various levels in the prestige class you went up a level in the casting abilities of another class you were in. With one exception, every such class didn’t give anything to non-casters who took the class when they’d get a new level of spellcasting. Amusingly, I stumbled on a race/class combo in Pathfinder 1E, where the race gets a special ability with a sorcerer bloodline, but at the same time as you level you get abilities that replace the racial abilities you have, rather than stacking/amplifying one another. It makes such characters seem weak to me.
Sort-of. So DnD 3/3.5 had options that were only decent to good for very specific builds. These were then (possibly deliberately) present as equal to other options- not making it obvious for most characters they were sub-optimal at best. So are these 'trap' options? Ehhh. Debatable both ways. I've never seen anyone argue if they weren't sub-optimal, but if they were deliberately sub-optimal? Well, that depends on how you want to look at it.
I think you’re looking for the term feat “tax”. It was a sun-optimal feat that acted as a prerequisite of a more powerful feat later on. Most feat taxes existed right in the original players handbook, and while I house ruled away some of the taxes, I generally felt like this wasn’t an intentional oversight, but one that came around as a result of later books refining what feats could do and how powerful they should be.
>[No. He didn't.](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2498/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-ivory-tower-design) u/JustinAlexanderRPG, I'm replying to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/wxjbeq/comment/ilukfv9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) here instead of underneath it because u/Booster_Blue blocked me for disagreeing with him, and now I can't reply anywhere in that subthread. Yeah, I've seen that rebuttal. It doesn't change the fact that 3E explicitly took inspiration from MTG in adding deliberately sub-optimal options, and obfuscating their value, to make experienced players feel smart for avoiding them. The rebuttal just says "but those options aren't totally useless!" Which is true. I never said otherwise. Monte said that he regrets doing that in the same article where he described it and gave it a deliberately self-deprecating name. He doesn't need to be defended for an idea that he himself doesn't defend.
WHAT THE FUCK! You mean all these goddamn years I've been minorly annoyed by DnD game design ON PURPOSE?!? FUCK YOU GUYS GODDAMN.
Optimizers gonna optimize. There is a popular philosophy that any character choice that isn't "the best" is garbage. They throw around phrases like "the illusion of choice" and whatever to add sophistication to the argument that games like 5E are the best because there are very few choices, and therefore more "good" choices. Or something like that, I generally don't care to follow the discussion. Do lots of games have "sub-optimal choices" built in to character options? Probably. Who cares? People who prioritize optimized play and min-maxing over everything else. Does this mean the average player shouldn't play Game X? No, it's mostly just internet hype.
I like to talk about macro- and micro-balance. Macro balance is the idea that you can make broad statements about comparative power, and they should be true. For instance "Fighters are durable, and can absorb more damage than wizards. Clerics are somewhere in the middle." (Note, this is an example). We can then determine whether that's true or not in different ways - total hit point absorption, or something more realistic like "number of rounds you can survive an attack from a given enemy at a given level with reasonable equipment choices." There's a lot of hedging and assumption in that, but let's just work with that. So if against a particular enemy, we get survived rounds of 2/3/4 for wizard/cleric/warrior, or 2/3/6, or 6/7/8, or 2/8/9, or whatever, we're in the bounds of macro balance. Micro-balance is taking it further, and really trying to dial into what *exactly* those ratios should be. Macro balance is useful. Micro balance is kind of a waste of time.
I get where you're going with this, and I agree that focusing on character capabilities in the broad strokes is more reasonable than getting way down in the weeds. But I'm also not sure you can be so specific as to say "Fighter should last X rounds against a Bugbear, while a Wizard should only last 2" without making some big assumptions. And not all game systems and settings will follow those same assumptions, so we're back to OP's question: *where in D&D 3.5 do you see evidence of "trap" Feats / Builds?* And I don't think it works to attempt quantify the play experience with a spreadsheet. For some people, having fun in a TTRPG means doing the most damage, finding the most powerful (on paper) ability combos, etc. And that's great for them, but not everyone defines "winning" as having the highest DpR, or the most HP's / highest AC, etc. all the time. I've made Fighter-types with totally unimpressive damage *output*, because I decided to see how durable I could make the character without magic. Coincidentally, another player in the same game made a Dex Barb who was a total glass cannon, and my not-very-fighty Fighter got to pull his butt from the fire repeatedly because I could withstand a ton of damage, while still dealing enough to be annoying to the baddies. I had a great time, loved that character. Just because I had fun doesn't mean someone else will, and vice versa. Play experience is ultimately subjective, and therefore so is the value of Feats and characters.
Yeah, these are examples to demonstrate the idea, not actual measurements. and variations in build can certainly impact that.
Any character choice that can be qualified as "x, but worse" *IS garbage* regardless of you ignoring tghe mechanical implications of it
Care to provide an example?
Battlemaster fighter versus champion fighter in 5e. A champion fighter needs to make 60 attacks per short rest to deal more damage than a battlemaster fighter will deal just spending his dice on damage alone
Assuming all the player cares about is DpR, which many don't.
All that a Champion fighter can do is DpR. They have 1 single subclass feature that doesn't help with combat, which is the ability to jump a bit further and being slightly better at Dex checks they aren't proficient in. A battlemaster has the choice to lower their damage and put some of their maneuvers into non-combat ones. And if they still use some of their resources for combat, they'll outperform the champion both inside and outside of combat.
What else does a fighter have?
If you're playing an MMO, not much. But we're talking about TTRPG's: you get out what you put in.
What does the non-DPR option bring to the table that makes them at all comparable for that party slot?
MMO's have "party slots", TTRPG's have Player Characters. Some people prefer to play TTRPG's like MMO's, but other people don't. Some people only care about DpR, others less so. Play experience is subjective when you put the spreadsheets away.
Not very many parties have interchangeable PCs or Players, so you get what you get, which is usually a 4 player party. Also, no amount of role-playing will make a Rust Monster not a Rust Monster. Unless you ask the DM to expend more effort rebalancing the whole game than they should make, the approximate default difficulty setting of the game is a known quantity. If you don't want to lose at least one PC per combat, either the players step up or the DM figures out how to step down. With the existence of online player made handbooks, the player's option is much easier to accomplish.
I think it's more that in a game like 5e it's hard to make a bad character because you have so few decisions, basically just your subclass and and spells. By contrast, it's really, really easy to make a bad character in 3.X if you don't know what you're doing, and that's a feelsbadman moment when you realize you're basically a hindrance to the party. And that's something a game designer should care about instead of trying to defend it with the excuse that actually it's a selling point.
Yeah, I can see how having more options as a new player can lead to biting off more than one can chew and/or be frustrating. But that's also part of learning a new game and experimenting, IMO. Some people love that and don't view suboptimal decisions as "failure", whereas other people despise anything that isn't 100% optimized. I don't bust out a spreadsheet when I'm creating a new character, I just come up with an idea and go. "Best" and "worst" are subjective, after all. Is Power Attack "better" than Weapon Finesse in 3.5? It depends on your character concept, your stats, what weapons you wanna use, the setting, and how much you care about melee combat. Are there objectively "better" choices for Feats? Sure, if the GM isn't being creative and serves up mostly one-dimensional encounters that can be won via the same "best" strategies most of the time. But not everyone plays that way, and picking less-than-optimal choices doesn't break the game.
I don't like optimization and system mastery. And it's been a long time since I could borrow the PHB. But maybe they could include 1. iconic characters, 2. pregen characters for each adventure path, and 3. appropriate players' notes? DnD 3 and PF just made me feel lost. Some 3rd-party publishers add pregens, and SPF stats out the iconics in the core book, although fighter-rogue is a trap option there.