Liareth wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:11 pm
Aelryn Bloodmoon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 9:06 pm
Liareth wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2020 6:21 pm
I agree strongly with the voices opposing grandfathering in this thread. In the past, my policy was to avoid grandfathering completely. Not only does it make new characters feel like they can't compete (I still get annoyed knowing that a wild dwarf kensai barb/fighter/wm exists, and I can never match them!), it also adds significant complexity to the code, which makes future changes harder to make. IMO, changes should just be applied,
and if they are too extreme, full rebuilds offered.
I confess I can't wrap my mind around this mentality. How does one, or even ten of those wild dwarfs existing, in random burst intervals that are likely to infrequently overlap with your playtime at best (because they will remain a rarity that can no longer be created), affect your story or make you unable to compete in any way? There are literal thousands of other characters that aren't those wild dwarfs that you can outperform - because there is also a real-time skill component to NWN, you may wildly outperform them anyway.
I don't want to sound critical, but I do want to engage this mentality, because I think it's responsible for a lot of the lost luster of the world's environment at times- a handful of people having a cookie for their character that you can't have shouldn't be the end of the world for you unless you are directly in confrontation with them, and sometimes the bad guys have some ridiculous power you need to overcome.
At its basest level, all RP in this game can be ignored and it can be viewed purely mechanically as a story based on percentage outcomes. But no one is ever going to enjoy the story if they're getting anxious over each and every single 5, 10, or 15% situational difference someone else has. Instead, isn't it better to just let those things that were created and those people have their fun, and build around your own fun instead?
I also agree with the premise of most grandfathered characters being sub-optimal by a wide margin due to a vast array of mechanical changes that followed their grandfathering in the first place, and I'm not even convinced it's a cut and dry case of them having an actual overall advantage anymore. I'm unfamiliar with the explicit wild dwarf build you're mentioning, but if someone is truly taking something abysmally broken and ruining everyone's good time with no regard for the Be Nice rule,
isn't that already covered, without taking away people's cookies?
Addendum; regarding code complexity, I can't speak on the subject - if something remaining grandfathered made it impossible for the rest of Arelith to remain stable, I wouldn't object to it being pulled, but I'd probably lean to the side of asking and possibly pleading with devs to try to put in the extra effort to not wipe an entire concept from play, as well, so long as it wasn't misery-inducing.
Balance is important, and a big part of that, IMO, is the belief that all players should have equal access to and abide by the same mechanical rules. It doesn't matter to me that a grandfathered character didn't shit in my cereal this morning. To players who enjoy character optimization, a lack of an even playing field can sour the fun.
In my example, it's just 2 AC and 1 APR, but that's still a significant difference in mechanical strength. And honestly, it doesn't change how the character is played at all [edit: in this particular build, in others it removes wands], especially after the lore changes, so why is it even a grandfathered path in the first place? Kensai should just be axed entirely.
The various caster paths are more difficult. They change the way a class is played at the core. It sucks to be a new player, see one of these grandfathered classes, say, "aw man that's so cool, how can I do that?", then realize you can never do that because the path is reserved for the lucky/smart old guard who were in the right place at the right time.
I don't think decisions should be made on the logic of "just let people have their cookies" or "well, they are having fun, so it's okay". We should want what's best for the server, which, at times, means removing fun cookies that players enjoy because they are not and cannot be properly balanced, or because they no longer fit the direction of the server. In these case I feel it's important to make sure players aren't hard done by - this is why I believe full rebuilds should be offered.
Why do players deserve to play removed paths that were deemed inappropriate for the server as a whole, for reasons of either balance or direction? Just because they pressed the 'new character' button? That doesn't seem fair to me at all. It's also not fair to shit on the hundreds of hours that players have invested into their character, which is why I believe the only sane option in these cases is a full rebuild.
So rather than respond paragraph by paragraph, I feel like it's better if I respond overall. I hear a lot of what you're saying, I think we're just in different overall camps about it. In most cases, I agree balance is important, but I think the atmosphere Arelith strives to foster of immersive narration is fundamentally harmed by obsessing over it.
This doesn't mean I think we need to turn devastating critical on. I'm not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's more about embracing the very clear premise of D&D (or if you're loudly in the camp of "Arelith isn't D&D," I'm happy to inform this holds true in NWN, as well) balancing around
parties of 3-5 pc's vs. monsters. It is a game balanced for cooperative story-telling wherein
occasionally you may have two characters go head to head for the sake of the story.
I firmly believe any perception that NWN, Arelith, or any iteration of a D20 system game is balanced around player vs. player balance is grossly flawed. It's not, it never has been, and other than ripping out vanilla's guts entirely and recreating a completely new game from scratch that still rolls d20 dice, you're not going to achieve that kind of balance. It's not a competitive MMO, and it's never going to sustain that level of balance no matter what efforts are put forward- the system can be made better and more enjoyable, but if you're changing it just for the sake of balance vs. other players, IMO you're wasting time and effort.
That wild dwarf having +2 ac means he's 10% less likely to get hit than you. Most of the time, that means he's 10% less likely to get hit than you against a monster, except Arelith isn't hard, and that 10% increase at end game probably means the monster still has a 5% chance to hit both of you, if you were both building for optimization in the first place. That +1 APR means he's going to kill those monsters faster than you, but I would happily have a civilized debate arguing the merits of that level of care about someone else's optimization in what is, generally, supposed to be a shared sandbox experience where you both get to tell your own cool stories with each other.
Here are what I believe are statistical facts about PvP combat in NWN, and Arelith in particular, allowing for all its interesting little changes. Removing player skill from the equation and assuming best circumstances for both sides in all situations-
A level 30 rogue is always going to beat a level 30 mage.
A level 30 fighter is always going to beat a level 30 rogue.
A level 30 mage is always going to beat a level 30 fighter.
Clerics are jesus, they will beat a level 30 version of any of the other types in a straight fight. It comes with channeling god.
That's your balance, right there. The balance between PC's isn't designed around percentage differentials, it's designed around how the different class kits can exploit (5% of the time, and complement the other 95%) each other, otherwise known as Rock-Paper-Scissors. When you add multi-classing, you add -Lizard-Spock to the end of that, and it all goes out the window.
I am completely sympathetic to the fact that grandfathering makes coding harder, and anything that damages the stability of Arelith in a measurable way has to go, no questions asked- but I don't think anyone should ever lose a character because someone crunching numbers realized that other build has a 10% advantage. I agree that not every feat or class choice is concept-breaking to lose, but I also think it would be disingenuous to say that a Weavemaster given a free recreate as a wizard or sorcerer can be told that they are role-playing the same character concept afterwards. While I acknowledge that there is effort to soften a blow there, the blow seems wholly unnecessary.
Edit: As to why I feel they deserve to play that character just because they created the character- it's because the server told them they could, when they did. They probably didn't know when they came up with the concept that it was going to go away - I myself sometimes plan concepts months out in advance before I get around to creating them, and people from GitGud can tell you, it's not because I'm obsessing over how to build it.
I guess what I'm saying is,
if it doesn't stop Arelith from working, why shouldn't they be allowed to play that concept out to its completion? How is it functionally any different from characters playing obsolete 5%'s?
I'd be happy to sort the conversation into different types of grandfathering as well, because clearly I have different stances depending on the circumstances, but as others have observed, this seems to be an all or nothing approach we're discussing.
