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→Alternate Formulation: new section
::::There will always be ways to go past the normal balance level with optimization. Fighter level can go into rogue level with clever choices, rogue level can go into wizard level, and wizard level can become Pun-Pun. I don't think that can be helped. --[[User:Aarnott|Aarnott]] 14:57, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
== Alternate Formulation ==
Thought I should get the ball rolling again back here. The current proposal seems a bit focused on defining the ranges themselves, rather than defining the components of those ranges and letting the ranges fall out of that. And that strikes me as problematic, for reasons I'll get to in a while by way of comparison. The ability table I'm working on would define the components and then let ranges fall out of it, but it just keeps getting bigger and more unwieldy and I don't know that it will wing up being useful at all. So rather than worry about it right now, I wanted to see if something slightly broader would work.
The idea is to break down things that we care about measuring, like combat damage or mobility or pets / minions, and then list what values or examples were acceptable for each of those things within a balance range. For example,
'''-Melee Damage-'''
*Low: Weapon + gear damage only, with moderate or poor BAB progression.
*Moderate: Single weapon + Sneak Attack gained by flanking with Moderate BAB (there's a math way to write this that might be more clear)
*High: Two weapons + Sneak Attack gained most of the time, but can still be cancelled
*Very High: As high, melee damage is generally not relevant at this level.
'''-Mobility-'''
*Low: No mobility adjustments, or base speed adjustments without accompanying combat tie-ins.
*Moderate: Base speed adjustments with accompanying combat tie-ins, limited tactical flight be level 15
*High: Limited tactical flight (or similar movement form) by level 10, limited teleport by level 15
*Very High: Limited tactical flight by level 5, limited go anywhere teleport by level 9
And so on for every category we care about. Then on the article balance page, we write about what we expect based on these breakdowns, and link back to the details for people who want them. The writeup could even look like the ones listed here already. The advantage of doing it this way is that we can better measure individual things about a class. If someone writes a class with a High range of mobility abilities and a Moderate range of melee damage, it's easier to point that out and let them make adjustments if it wasn't intentional. It also means that we can better gauge support classes like the Marshall that don't fit into the standard balance descriptions, since we can just ignore the parts that aren't relevant and focus on ability balance of the parts that are. It's somewhat hard to gauge classes like that with the current setup, since it's not really addressed.
Thoughts on this sort of setup? - [[User:Tarkisflux|Tarkisflux]] <sup>[[User talk:Tarkisflux|Talk]]</sup> 20:36, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
