Balance is one of those loaded words you get when talking about game design. Most people think it’s good, some people think it’s bad, and nearly everyone has a different idea of what exactly it means. While everyone’s opinion of what game balance actually ‘is’ may vary, nearly everyone can agree that balanced games are good and unbalanced games aren’t good.
So what makes a game unbalanced or balance? What exactly are we talking about when we say balance? I think it has its roots in competitive gaming. With any competition, there must be rules to determine who wins and who loses. If the rules are fair and sensible, the competition will usually be good, but if the rules are unfair or arbitrary the competition might fail. I think RPGs fall into a unique category. While you can still be highly competitive and build awesome characters, the game functions best as a team match against the GM’s non-physical opponents. Usually when the players try to outright beat the GM or the other way around, bad things happen. This creates a unique circumstance where the game can remain competitive, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of the game. Because of this unique circumstance, I think balance in the rules is still important, but I don’t think it’s the only factor to consider in a good game design. Personally, I would actually prefer a game with less balance and more flare to a game with perfect balance and nothing interesting to do. This can only be taken so far, of course. A game with serious balance issues can easily ruin the play experience.
One of my players has an interesting saying, “It’s good to have low hp.” He’s also been known to say, “It’s good to have more hp than your buddies.” I think the reasoning here is that: if you have low hp, the GM can’t kill you; and if you have high hp, everyone else will die first. I think this logic tells us something about balance in game design. Balance among ‘characters’ appears to be more important than balance between PCs and their enemies. A good GM will usually tailor challenges to his players. If the group is strong, the enemies will be strong. If the group is weak, the foes will be of lesser power and numbers. In essence, it’s probably very hard to unbalance your game with strong or weak opponents for the PCs, but it’s very easy to unbalance it with a disparity of power between the player’s characters themselves. By this logic, it makes sense to focus your efforts of balance on character creation and similar.
Given that we can generally agree that balance is good, can we also say that perfect game balance is ideal? I would personally say, no. I think perfect game balance is probably achievable, but not ideal for an RPG. Chess, Risk, and Monopoly would all be almost perfectly balanced. All the players have identical statistics and equal chances to do everything in the game. Making all characters duplicates in an RPG would probably make a dull game. In essence, I think the variance in characters is part of what makes RPGs fun. The combination of character types A, B, C, and X working together and relying on each other’s strengths and weaknesses is the fun of the game. I think the key is to make each of the different character types equally fun to play given their variability.
Another interesting point to consider is how you achieve this variability in character design. In the past, it was mostly chance that determined what kind of character you would be playing. At present, it’s almost totally a personal choice of what character you want to play and what will fit in well with your group. The problem with random chance is that, you can wind up with a good or bad character based on pure chaos. The problem with choosing everything is that, you’ll most likely play the same thing over and over because it’s the ‘best.’ Neither system creates a perfectly balanced game, but we’re not looking for perfect balance, are we? What we want is a balance between the different ‘types’ of characters.
Why do we want variability in character types? Essentially, we want something that’s not balanced. We want to be different. We want to find powerful combinations. We want unique and interesting characters to play. Just like in a good book, it’s more fun to read about an interesting and varied character with strengths and weaknesses than it is to read about a cardboard cut-out. If RPGs were only a game, we probably wouldn’t care if everyone was identical, but it’s a story too. Stories need great characters. Great characters are different from everyone else before them.
It ‘is’ possible to generate great characters and stories even with identical sets of statistics. However, I think variable types of characters encourage further building of unique and interesting characters. However it comes about, characters with unique traits make for fun games. Whether you play a wizard, a warrior, a fellow with a great magic item, or a guy with the ultimate catchphrase, as long as you play something different; you’re in business.
The tricky part comes in when you try to encourage creativity by game design of different types of characters, and then mix that with pure competition. Competitive instinct among players is often a stronger force than coming up with a cool character idea. This doesn’t mean that no-one cares about cool characters. It only means that players like to get all the best stuff first, and then design a cool character concept around all that awesomeness. The whole trick is allowing a number of different players to all come up with highly powerful character ‘types’ all with different ‘stories’ to them, and then still end up with a relatively balanced statistical game. I say ‘relatively’ because I think true balance wouldn’t be much fun to play. Players have a lot of fun searching for the best character builds in a system. If you take that away, or make it too easy to get the ‘best’ character concept; they’ll probably lose interest.
Weaknesses and strengths can be a very useful tool. One character might be the king of combat, but if your game requires some espionage and he can’t do squat with that—then he’ll have to rely on a buddy for help. The tricky part is striking an ideal balance of types of characters. Often, game designs have too many options or character types. This usually results in heroes who can do everything, or a load of ‘bad’ options and a couple good ones. Some games have too few options which usually result in a lot of characters which feel the same.
What aspects are you balancing against each other? Combat prowess is usually considered far more valuable than social skills in most games. Why should this be so? For one thing, most players will personally role-play social encounters while they’ll break out the d20’s for combat. This makes combat ‘statistics’ more valuable than social ‘statistics’ in almost all circumstances.
I would recommend first finding out what types of characters you want in your game, and what options will determine those types. You can go about this any way you like, but it makes sense that you should have a good reason for each ‘type’ you put into the game. If you just put a thousand builds because they would be cool, or 4 because that’s traditional; game balance might be harder to achieve.
Once you have your types and the reasons for including them, you’ll probably want to try to balance them to some extent. Because all of the types are probably uniquely different, it will be very hard to correlate them to each other. Sometimes you don’t have to. Player A can be happy being the best at fighting, and player B can be happy being the best at baking cakes. That said, most players like to have a goodly amount of ‘power’ which can roughly be quantified as how many bad guys they can whack in ten seconds. Power can also be the ability to mess around with reality by magic, recruit millions of followers, brainwash people, evade all traps, do amazing stunts, or whatever. Players often judge the power of their characters by the quantity and timeliness of being able to use those abilities effectively. Many players might enjoy a high climbing ability if they could use it a lot. However, if it is never encountered in the game, it’s next to useless.
Some players are happy to play a character who may not be the best in the group overall, but ‘is’ the best in a specialized area. While most players would prefer to be the most bad-ass warrior ever, a high number will settle for being the only guy in the group who can survive in the woods, track enemies, have animal friends, and stealth. You start to run into problems when the strongest character in the group is also the one that’s the best at absolutely everything.
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When considering balance, it’s also good to consider the impact of adding in more rules, powers, and modifiers. Essentially, the more things you dump into a system, the harder it is to balance. The more things you have in a game, the better the chance someone will come up with a combination you hadn’t considered. If you include too few options, the players might become bored with lifeless characters who have no choices. Another consideration is that if all the players have the same options, the game is inherently ‘balanced’ in a sense because they could all pick exactly the same thing. While this might appear to be a good thing, it can actually cause a lot of problems. Consider if one player found what he considered the ‘ideal’ character build. If all other players had access to that exact combination and agreed with him, then it would make sense that they would all play almost identical players to ‘be the most powerful’. Having a load of identical characters is often very, very bad for a game. If certain choices prohibit other choices, you might have a chance to fix this problem. If all the most powerful character builds are warriors and you include a magical obstacle only a wizard can get past, you’ve essentially fixed the duplicate character problem, or at least found a way to seriously annoy your clone characters.
Something else to consider is the character that starts out weak and gets powerful in the end compared to one which follows a median all the way through. I personally find that a bit annoying, but it ‘is’ a form of balance. Another conundrum is the weakling syndrome. If all the characters in your game are incredibly weak, it might not matter what ‘type’ of character they are. Survival will depend more on their skills as a player than their statistics—which are pretty abysmal.
In summary, I think it’s good to consider game balance very seriously. Still, I’d prefer a fun game to a balanced one. I suppose this is partly personal preference. Being the GM, game balance is usually a non-issue for me because I tend to mess around with rules to a fairly heavy extent. In the player’s shoes, game balance is much more of a concern. When I can cheat the game to be the best ever, it usually annoys me. Likewise if my buddy is the best and I can’t do anything helpful.
So what makes a game unbalanced or balance? What exactly are we talking about when we say balance? I think it has its roots in competitive gaming. With any competition, there must be rules to determine who wins and who loses. If the rules are fair and sensible, the competition will usually be good, but if the rules are unfair or arbitrary the competition might fail. I think RPGs fall into a unique category. While you can still be highly competitive and build awesome characters, the game functions best as a team match against the GM’s non-physical opponents. Usually when the players try to outright beat the GM or the other way around, bad things happen. This creates a unique circumstance where the game can remain competitive, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of the game. Because of this unique circumstance, I think balance in the rules is still important, but I don’t think it’s the only factor to consider in a good game design. Personally, I would actually prefer a game with less balance and more flare to a game with perfect balance and nothing interesting to do. This can only be taken so far, of course. A game with serious balance issues can easily ruin the play experience.
One of my players has an interesting saying, “It’s good to have low hp.” He’s also been known to say, “It’s good to have more hp than your buddies.” I think the reasoning here is that: if you have low hp, the GM can’t kill you; and if you have high hp, everyone else will die first. I think this logic tells us something about balance in game design. Balance among ‘characters’ appears to be more important than balance between PCs and their enemies. A good GM will usually tailor challenges to his players. If the group is strong, the enemies will be strong. If the group is weak, the foes will be of lesser power and numbers. In essence, it’s probably very hard to unbalance your game with strong or weak opponents for the PCs, but it’s very easy to unbalance it with a disparity of power between the player’s characters themselves. By this logic, it makes sense to focus your efforts of balance on character creation and similar.
Given that we can generally agree that balance is good, can we also say that perfect game balance is ideal? I would personally say, no. I think perfect game balance is probably achievable, but not ideal for an RPG. Chess, Risk, and Monopoly would all be almost perfectly balanced. All the players have identical statistics and equal chances to do everything in the game. Making all characters duplicates in an RPG would probably make a dull game. In essence, I think the variance in characters is part of what makes RPGs fun. The combination of character types A, B, C, and X working together and relying on each other’s strengths and weaknesses is the fun of the game. I think the key is to make each of the different character types equally fun to play given their variability.
Another interesting point to consider is how you achieve this variability in character design. In the past, it was mostly chance that determined what kind of character you would be playing. At present, it’s almost totally a personal choice of what character you want to play and what will fit in well with your group. The problem with random chance is that, you can wind up with a good or bad character based on pure chaos. The problem with choosing everything is that, you’ll most likely play the same thing over and over because it’s the ‘best.’ Neither system creates a perfectly balanced game, but we’re not looking for perfect balance, are we? What we want is a balance between the different ‘types’ of characters.
Why do we want variability in character types? Essentially, we want something that’s not balanced. We want to be different. We want to find powerful combinations. We want unique and interesting characters to play. Just like in a good book, it’s more fun to read about an interesting and varied character with strengths and weaknesses than it is to read about a cardboard cut-out. If RPGs were only a game, we probably wouldn’t care if everyone was identical, but it’s a story too. Stories need great characters. Great characters are different from everyone else before them.
It ‘is’ possible to generate great characters and stories even with identical sets of statistics. However, I think variable types of characters encourage further building of unique and interesting characters. However it comes about, characters with unique traits make for fun games. Whether you play a wizard, a warrior, a fellow with a great magic item, or a guy with the ultimate catchphrase, as long as you play something different; you’re in business.
The tricky part comes in when you try to encourage creativity by game design of different types of characters, and then mix that with pure competition. Competitive instinct among players is often a stronger force than coming up with a cool character idea. This doesn’t mean that no-one cares about cool characters. It only means that players like to get all the best stuff first, and then design a cool character concept around all that awesomeness. The whole trick is allowing a number of different players to all come up with highly powerful character ‘types’ all with different ‘stories’ to them, and then still end up with a relatively balanced statistical game. I say ‘relatively’ because I think true balance wouldn’t be much fun to play. Players have a lot of fun searching for the best character builds in a system. If you take that away, or make it too easy to get the ‘best’ character concept; they’ll probably lose interest.
Weaknesses and strengths can be a very useful tool. One character might be the king of combat, but if your game requires some espionage and he can’t do squat with that—then he’ll have to rely on a buddy for help. The tricky part is striking an ideal balance of types of characters. Often, game designs have too many options or character types. This usually results in heroes who can do everything, or a load of ‘bad’ options and a couple good ones. Some games have too few options which usually result in a lot of characters which feel the same.
What aspects are you balancing against each other? Combat prowess is usually considered far more valuable than social skills in most games. Why should this be so? For one thing, most players will personally role-play social encounters while they’ll break out the d20’s for combat. This makes combat ‘statistics’ more valuable than social ‘statistics’ in almost all circumstances.
I would recommend first finding out what types of characters you want in your game, and what options will determine those types. You can go about this any way you like, but it makes sense that you should have a good reason for each ‘type’ you put into the game. If you just put a thousand builds because they would be cool, or 4 because that’s traditional; game balance might be harder to achieve.
Once you have your types and the reasons for including them, you’ll probably want to try to balance them to some extent. Because all of the types are probably uniquely different, it will be very hard to correlate them to each other. Sometimes you don’t have to. Player A can be happy being the best at fighting, and player B can be happy being the best at baking cakes. That said, most players like to have a goodly amount of ‘power’ which can roughly be quantified as how many bad guys they can whack in ten seconds. Power can also be the ability to mess around with reality by magic, recruit millions of followers, brainwash people, evade all traps, do amazing stunts, or whatever. Players often judge the power of their characters by the quantity and timeliness of being able to use those abilities effectively. Many players might enjoy a high climbing ability if they could use it a lot. However, if it is never encountered in the game, it’s next to useless.
Some players are happy to play a character who may not be the best in the group overall, but ‘is’ the best in a specialized area. While most players would prefer to be the most bad-ass warrior ever, a high number will settle for being the only guy in the group who can survive in the woods, track enemies, have animal friends, and stealth. You start to run into problems when the strongest character in the group is also the one that’s the best at absolutely everything.
View attachment 57076
When considering balance, it’s also good to consider the impact of adding in more rules, powers, and modifiers. Essentially, the more things you dump into a system, the harder it is to balance. The more things you have in a game, the better the chance someone will come up with a combination you hadn’t considered. If you include too few options, the players might become bored with lifeless characters who have no choices. Another consideration is that if all the players have the same options, the game is inherently ‘balanced’ in a sense because they could all pick exactly the same thing. While this might appear to be a good thing, it can actually cause a lot of problems. Consider if one player found what he considered the ‘ideal’ character build. If all other players had access to that exact combination and agreed with him, then it would make sense that they would all play almost identical players to ‘be the most powerful’. Having a load of identical characters is often very, very bad for a game. If certain choices prohibit other choices, you might have a chance to fix this problem. If all the most powerful character builds are warriors and you include a magical obstacle only a wizard can get past, you’ve essentially fixed the duplicate character problem, or at least found a way to seriously annoy your clone characters.
Something else to consider is the character that starts out weak and gets powerful in the end compared to one which follows a median all the way through. I personally find that a bit annoying, but it ‘is’ a form of balance. Another conundrum is the weakling syndrome. If all the characters in your game are incredibly weak, it might not matter what ‘type’ of character they are. Survival will depend more on their skills as a player than their statistics—which are pretty abysmal.
In summary, I think it’s good to consider game balance very seriously. Still, I’d prefer a fun game to a balanced one. I suppose this is partly personal preference. Being the GM, game balance is usually a non-issue for me because I tend to mess around with rules to a fairly heavy extent. In the player’s shoes, game balance is much more of a concern. When I can cheat the game to be the best ever, it usually annoys me. Likewise if my buddy is the best and I can’t do anything helpful.
