D&D monster level balance

I just noticed that the D&D monsters are made according to a strict formula. They are assigned a level, a role, statistics, and powers, then hit points, defenses, and attack and damage bonuses are calculated based on level, role, and statistics. The level of the monster is an input, not a calculated value; it is not affected by how good the monster’s statistics and powers are. This would explain why the effectiveness of many monsters seems to vary greatly from the level of the monster.

The needlefang drake swarm, for instance, is described as level 2 because it uses the basic statistics of a level 2 monster. The unbelievable offensive power provided by its special abilities is not taken into account. The zombie, on the other hand, is also considered level 2, but its "special power" of having incredibly low stats makes it very weak.

I'm estimating that the needlefang drake swarm is effective level 6 and the zombie is effective level 1 (and on the low side of that).

Unimportant Skills

When thinking about game design, one issue that comes up is how to handle the cost of skills with little or no game use. The traditional approach has been to make them cost as much as useful skills, which is clearly a bad idea and hoses characters with interesting character conceptions.
Although technically one might expect minor skills like “mason” to have some small point value, I quite respect D&D’s choice not to implement this. There are a number of practical difficulties in assigning a point value to unimportant skills:

1. It takes space in the rules.
2. Since D&D is choice-based rather than point-based, there is no mechanism by which a skill could cost very little to get.
3. If a skill is worthless, it is cheap to become incredibly good at the skill. There is a risk of players then trying to abuse the skill by claiming they can do incredible, useful things with this much skill.
4. If the GM does not adjust the skill cost to the campaign, it would be all to easy for some of these cheap skill to become very underpriced because they are used much more often in that particular campaign.

Introduction

Hi, I'm a fanatic about game design. Right now I'm really excited by 4th edition D&D. I used to play D&D when I was a kid, but when more sophisticated game systems came out I lost interest. 3rd edition was a very interesting improvement, but still didn't really improve D&D enough for my tastes. 4th edition, however, is totally different. It seems like a huge leap in game design, really a different game. This is the first game I've ever seen that looks like something I would design - a "game balanced" game. In 3rd edition, the different classes were so totally different, I couldn't even analyze whether they were balanced at all, I could only guess. The wizard had a whole bunch of annoying limitations about casting spells, but when he cast one, the effect was insanely superior to anything a non-spellcaster could ever do. The cleric was the ultimate healing god that you couldn't function without. I always felt these classes at high level were much better than the fighter types, and the fighters were there to distract the enemies and deal with ambushes. Who can tell, though, the abilities were so orthogonal.



In 4th edition, everything is built around a balanced design. Characters work in an identifiably similar manner, and the differences in things like hit points and armor class are far less drastic. The wonderful thing is that the characters still feel very different - something I've found challenging to achieve when trying to balance the game.