In my experience, use of haste is the exact opposite of stealing the spotlight: the players of the fighter PCs are constantly begging me to cast it, because it lets them go totally nuts, and my refusal to cast it is because I want to have some of the fun myself.
This is an important distinction. Haste is, IMO, the single most powerful spell-for-its-level a wizard can cast, so if wizards are overpowered, surely this spell is part of the reason why. But casting this spell does not make the average wizard an unpleasant party member; on the contrary, casting it makes everyone have a lot more fun. The kinds of things that wizards can do that ruin the fun for other people are casting save-or-die spells, or summoning creatures tha can outfight the fighters (I remember the first time an augmented celestial rhino got in a powerful charge; the fighter’s player looked at me and said, I think I quote, “Dammit, you’re not supposed to do that much damage, that’s MY job!”), or otherwise turn other characters superfluous.
Coming back to the tiers, then, maybe that’s part of the problem with this analysis. Since the goal is to get everyone to have maximum fun, analyzing relative power levels is something of a tangent. You need to figure out whether certain classes by default eliminate other players’ fun, not figure out which ones are most powerful.
Well…years ago, I played a druid in a high-level game, and we knew we were going up against a beholder and several of its charmed minions. We planned out a careful battle sequence. Then the battle started, and as planned, I opened with a firestorm. The firestorm killed a few of the minions, and forced massive damage saves, taking out the beholder and everyone else. Everyone else just looked at me and said, “Well, okay then.” I felt kind of bad about it.
I don’t think all players think in tiers, but the DM should certainly be aware of many classes strengths and weaknesses, or at least the PC’s current lineup’s. Otherwise it’s hell to make fun. If you have Wizards and Clerics in your party, so long as they’re not complete gimmick builds, you have a little more freedom since you can feel more confident that they have SOME tool to defuse the situation. A fighter or a rogue? You have to be more careful and focus on traps, things that can be hit, or at least know you have to be creative with the terrain (so you can have an arena where the fighter can use his Str to push a pillar onto them or something).
Even the tier guides linked specifically said it wasn’t to bash classes or say you shouldn’t play them. The tier concept is just a guideline so you know how much wiggle room you have with campaign and encounter design, it prevents the game from become the exact same thing over and over. If you have a lower tier party you just know ahead of time that you may have to get a bit more creative. Wizards may be able to deal with an illusion-infested Illithid den, but a party of fighters might need an adventure beforehand to get immunity to illusions from The Sage, or know that you might have to place buttons around to turn the illusions off.
It’s certainly not something the average player needs to worry about (though I’d argue that most average players have at least noticed a lot of the power disparities, even if they’re not convinced it’s a problem), but tiers are definitely something to keep in mind when creating an adventure. A player could even consider tiers when making characters to better aid the party and take design stress off the DM, though that should take a back seat to fun.
As my leisure time decreases, my willingness to be judgmental about who I spend that leisure time with increases :). In any case, any analysis of the game that’ll be useful to me will assume that the players have basic social skills.
Jragon, that’s probably a decent point about flexibility. The more flexible a class is, the more you can design ill-defined problems for the PC to overcome.
Where does the idea that all people who play RPGs are geeks come from? I do exactly 3 “geeky” things:
Play D&D
Post on the SDMB
Play video games
And number 3 is pretty much mainstream nowadays.
Other than that? I play/watch soccer (mostly watch), sport fight/watch sport fights (mostly fight), go out with friends, work out… Nothing “geeky”. I’ve only read Lord of the Rings because my teacher made me, I’ve never seen Star Wars nor do I particularly want too. No one who knows me would call me a geek. Of the people I’ve played D&D with over the years, two (brothers) played sports in school; Two were stereotypical “geeks” (Although only one of those was “weird”) and the rest were average people who don’t really fit any stereotype.
I did think of one time thinking of tiers as a PLAYER is good – this is something that I think is obvious to a lot of players, but generally goes unspoken and isn’t usually formalized. Having a party with two fighters is generally rarer and more odd than a party with two wizards. Even more generally, you rarely see two instances of a co-functional lower tier class (Fighter + Barbarian), whereas seeing a Wizard + Sorcerer combo or something similar is much less odd. If tiers were utter bullshit, I don’t think this would really be the case.
I’m not saying you can’t have fun with a four-fighter party or whatever other nonsense, a good group and DM can have fun with anything. It’s just that without deliberately doing a gimmick adventure, it generally behooves players to keep in mind that the higher tier more flexible classes are generally more acceptable to double-up on, because it causes everyone to feel like they bring something special to the game since it’s less likely you’ll be doubling up on the same role.
You’re talking about a different set of people from smiling bandit and LHoD. To wit:
Not everyone who plays D&D is an ubergeek or even really a geek, but a not-insignificant portion are. And believe me, those social fallacies are in full swing among the poorly-socialized geek population. They contribute to a lot of issues many ‘mainstream’ people don’t put up with. D&D gets hit with them more than video games because video games are not necessarily social while D&D is.
Count me in as one who doesn’t mind one bit being regarded as geeky. Well, technically, I prefer the term “nerd”, but that’s what most people mean when they say “geek”, anyway.
