Manbearcat
Legend
There are two goals that proper balance/mechanical quality control work toward realizing:
1) Inter-character resource parity:
Balance helps realize this goal by ensuring that each characters' deployable resources at the table will perform at, or near, a mean level of performance. This achieves two ends;
- Each character will be able to meaningfully contribute and therefore each player will have the opportunity for their character to be expressed as a legitimate protagonist within the fiction.
- The DM does not have to plan encounters/conflicts, or outright campaign arcs, around the potency (or impotency) of one (or more particular characters) due to the vast resource disparity. There is little more maddening to a player than when their martial character (who is supposed to be a legitimate protagonist) cannot meaningfully contribute in a climactic fight because he cannot hit a BBG or cannot dodge a BBG because in order to challenge "the party" you must derive numbers (AC, to hit, damage) for that BBG that pose a challenge to a martial character whose numbers are out of whack (AC, to hit). Obviously there are plenty of orthogonal cases as well that are not purely tangible statistics driven but intangible resource driven; eg fighter vs druid, all martial characters vs generalist wizard.
2) Consistency and predictability of encounter/conflict output relative to PC output:
The DM will be able to predictably extrapolate how each character's potential resource deployment, and the group in the aggregate, will affect combat and non-combat encounters specifically and campaign arcs generally. This, of course, works toward the end of the DM being able to consistently compose dynamic/interesting conflicts and plot-device for the PCs to engage with...rather than boring walk-throughs, climactic fights/scenes that fall flat, or accidental, DM-driven TPKs (or worse yet, when DMs feel they must "save the game" because they didn't reliably predict the difficulty of an encounter and put the campaign at risk due to their lack of foresight).
Caveats for each:
1 does not need need to be expressed through homogenization (it just makes it "easier" to constrain the upper and lower bounds of PC output). If properly and rigorously playtested and quality controlled, "problem-children" resources should be readily identifiable and thus manicured/manipulated upward or downward so their performance is "in-line". You can have a vast swath of inter-class diversity (mechanically and within the fiction) while still having predictable performance and relative parity.
2 does not mean that "of-level" encounters are mandated and there MUST BE NO DEVIATION OR NO SOUP FOR YOU. It is not a "world-building mandate". Having a base-line and a tutorial on how to create base-line challenges just allows for predictable challenge output vs PC output. Using that established base-line as a reliable metric, the DM can then compose as many deadly or walkthrough challenges as they wish. They can compose a world where TPKs lurk around every bend or where PC groups stomp monster faces in a Monty Haul Candyland. World-building is up to their playstyle preferences.
1) Inter-character resource parity:
Balance helps realize this goal by ensuring that each characters' deployable resources at the table will perform at, or near, a mean level of performance. This achieves two ends;
- Each character will be able to meaningfully contribute and therefore each player will have the opportunity for their character to be expressed as a legitimate protagonist within the fiction.
- The DM does not have to plan encounters/conflicts, or outright campaign arcs, around the potency (or impotency) of one (or more particular characters) due to the vast resource disparity. There is little more maddening to a player than when their martial character (who is supposed to be a legitimate protagonist) cannot meaningfully contribute in a climactic fight because he cannot hit a BBG or cannot dodge a BBG because in order to challenge "the party" you must derive numbers (AC, to hit, damage) for that BBG that pose a challenge to a martial character whose numbers are out of whack (AC, to hit). Obviously there are plenty of orthogonal cases as well that are not purely tangible statistics driven but intangible resource driven; eg fighter vs druid, all martial characters vs generalist wizard.
2) Consistency and predictability of encounter/conflict output relative to PC output:
The DM will be able to predictably extrapolate how each character's potential resource deployment, and the group in the aggregate, will affect combat and non-combat encounters specifically and campaign arcs generally. This, of course, works toward the end of the DM being able to consistently compose dynamic/interesting conflicts and plot-device for the PCs to engage with...rather than boring walk-throughs, climactic fights/scenes that fall flat, or accidental, DM-driven TPKs (or worse yet, when DMs feel they must "save the game" because they didn't reliably predict the difficulty of an encounter and put the campaign at risk due to their lack of foresight).
Caveats for each:
1 does not need need to be expressed through homogenization (it just makes it "easier" to constrain the upper and lower bounds of PC output). If properly and rigorously playtested and quality controlled, "problem-children" resources should be readily identifiable and thus manicured/manipulated upward or downward so their performance is "in-line". You can have a vast swath of inter-class diversity (mechanically and within the fiction) while still having predictable performance and relative parity.
2 does not mean that "of-level" encounters are mandated and there MUST BE NO DEVIATION OR NO SOUP FOR YOU. It is not a "world-building mandate". Having a base-line and a tutorial on how to create base-line challenges just allows for predictable challenge output vs PC output. Using that established base-line as a reliable metric, the DM can then compose as many deadly or walkthrough challenges as they wish. They can compose a world where TPKs lurk around every bend or where PC groups stomp monster faces in a Monty Haul Candyland. World-building is up to their playstyle preferences.
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