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Game Balance Isn’t Everything

Stefon Mears — Official Website Posted on by
Old School Anti-Paladin

Old School Anti-Paladin

Sometimes I miss Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  Technically I mean the second edition, but when it was released I don’t remember anyone differentiating between first and second editions.  It was the new edition and everyone I knew made the change.  There was so much to like: specialist wizards beyond the illusionist, specialty priests whose choice of gods really mattered, and even more.

Oh, there were real and concerning problems of rules creep – specialty priests grew powerful well out of proportion with the other classes (especially in the Forgotten Realms) and the introduction of “kits” and Player’s Option rules allowed for a wide variety of abuse.  Oh, and the THACO system was never ideal.

Third edition (including 3.5) brought in a good working skills system and the flexibility of feats.  Fourth edition went further, bringing balance to the classes on a level that the game had never before seen.  Encounters became easier for a GM to put together and players had more races and classes to choose from than ever before.*

But AD&D has a charm and nostalgia that still speaks to me.  I don’t know if it’s the percentage dice thieves rolled for their skills or the obsessive need wizards had to expand their spell lists.  Maybe it was the disconnection between magic item powers and character abilities or the fact that the anti-paladin was a viable villain.

That last one is definitely part of it; the anti-paladin was once a great antagonist.  Oh, it’s true that in 3E or 4E you can make an evil paladin (including a Blackguard prestige class), but it lacks the sinister vileness of the classic anti-paladin.  This was an era when the only paladins were required to be paragons of Lawful Good, and the anti-paladin was the opposite of everything they represented.

It could just be my cold talking, but I would love a chance to play in one more AD&D campaign: six-months to a year of old school classic gaming.  I’d have to have the right group, though – serious roleplayers who won’t minimax but play their well-conceived characters to the hilt.

Am I alone in this?

*Of course, the more adventurous of us used the AD&D create-your-own-class rules and stretched the boundaries anyway.

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About Stefon

Stefon Mears earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from N.I.L.A., and his B.A. in Religious Studies (double emphasis in Ritual and Mythology) from U.C. Berkeley. Stefon's short pieces have sold to magazines such as Fireside and Strange Horizons and anthologies edited by Otto Penzler, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kevin J. Anderson, Denise Little, Kerrie L. Hughes, and John Helfers. He has published more than thirty novels to date, including the Jumpstart Duchy series, the Rise of Magic series, the Cavan Oltblood series, and still others. Look for him online at https://www.stefonmears.com, on Facebook, or @stefonmears on Twitter. Sign up for his newsletter at stefonmears.com/join

Comments

Game Balance Isn’t Everything — 9 Comments

  1. Robin, I’ll never forget your IC alignment arguments with Patrick and you eventually just wrote the short cut on paper plates to save time.

    Michael, we need to fight inertia and find you, dammit. We may finally be starting up a gaming group if you’re interested!

    Becky, in some ways the one shots were the most fun! It’s how I learned FUDGE!

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  2. I miss the game variety too, Becky. I do love campaigns but there’s a lot to be said for smaller contained games that last only one session, or perhaps two or three. I also enjoyed switching from one rules system to another. I think doing so frequently helped free us from the connection between rules and setting (the connection the publishers try to push, anyhow), as well as freeing us to mix and match or simply modify rules to improve them. Then too, short stories exist for a reason; not every tale ought to be ten volumes long.

    As for AD&D, I have strongly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I have a lot of nostalgia for AD&D, probably because it was the first truly viable RPG in my eyes. I mean, I still have my blue box D&D set around somewhere, along with Eldritch Wizardry and all that, but I have to be honest; those rules were a mess. D&D was more than half miniature-based wargame back then, after all, so it was exciting to have a set of rules that were based more on telling stories, and less on how to integrate single-unit rules with Chainmail.

    AD&D… wow. You mean I can be an Elf AND a Fighting-man… er… fighter? Hot damn! I can be a Hobb… err.. Halfling AND an Assassin? Sign me up! The twin-axis alignment system was also pretty much a work of genius, I have to confess. In the decades since, I haven’t seen anyone come up with a better alignment system. Oh, it’s deeply flawed of course, and no, it bears little resemblance to how people think in reality, but it’s a very useful tool for quickly sorting people into groups and establishing who’s likely to work together with whom, and who will just betray whom, and so on.

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  3. My first RPG was the Dungeon and Dragons basic box. So i recall how thrilled I was at the different classes and abilities of Rangers, Paladins, Monks, Druids, and Assassins in the Advanced rules class.

    The paladin always appealed to me … but 17 charisma? That was always a very high bar to pass. In some other game years later, I delighted in playing a (Shadowrun) Orc character who always wanted to be a paladin but had to keep his face hidden, partly inspired by the E.B. White Lancelot, no doubt.

    I did enjoy reading the blackguard rules from the computer form of 3rd edition (Balder’s gate, I think?) And of course, you met me as yet another form of paladin, once upon a virtual world …

    I almost always struggle to RP a truly evil character. In person or online. I guess i find helping people just so much more natural AND enjoyable? Some people are scarred for life, I guess, by their childhoods.

    By the way … looked for you and Melissa at the Wizard Comic Con yetderday, hoping I’d bump into you. Impulse decision to attend on my part, but so wanted to spot you there by chance. There was a Thor there who I had to look at twice to be sure he wasn’t you … 🙂

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    • Heh. Sorry, I’ve been laid up with a nasty cold. We’re going to try to make at least one day of Gamestorm next month.

      Yeah, the entry requirements for the paladin were rough, but I always took that to indicate how rare they should be among the NPCs more than among the PCs. PCs are exceptional by definition, after all.

      You’ve reminded me, though, that the updated version of Balder’s Gate is out, and I should really spend a little time playing it.

      Evil characters can be tough for people. I’ve twice tried to run a thieves campaign, and in neither case did it work out well (though one did present a marvelous Reservoir Dogs moment). Maybe I’ll post about it sometime.

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  4. I miss our old gaming group. The one that played various systems – DND, runequest, storyteller, castle falkenstein, shadowrun, whatever. For DND, I liked 2nd ed, but I loved 3rd. I stopped there. 4th became too much like a computer game. Looks like their going back to old school with 5th edition, so you may get your wish.

    But the SETTINGS they came out with for 2nd are still my favorite. Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Maztica.

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    • That was part of what I loved about 2nd edition — it fired people’s imaginations in ways that even the options of 3rd and 4th never did.

      4th got hit with the video game rap harder than it deserved. People forget sometimes that the video games all culled from D&D, and WotC wanted to see what it could learn from their mistakes. I have to say, the game balance is amazing. Every class is interesting and involved. But that doesn’t mean it’s for you. If you’re still happy with 3 or 3.5, you don’t need the switch. Did you ever get into Pathfinder?

      I do miss the game variety we had with that group: one-shots mixed in among campaigns.

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