[rant] Balance schmalance

I've been lurking on these boards since EN still ran them and we all knew the rule about his grandma, and I haven't said much in that time (you guys are fast and damn good). But I really need to get this out there.

BALANCE SCHMALANCE.

That felt good.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm 100% behind the desire for balance in the game, and the need for it. But it just can't be perfect folks, too many variables. Have you ever tried to pass off your off-the-rack blue blazer and your off-the-rack blue slacks as an off-the-rack blue suit? You might have fooled yourself into thinking the colors were the same, but believe me, no one else was buyin' it.

So it is with balance in the game. The harder you try to get it just right, the weirder it starts to look. My solution to the blue suit problem is to say a bad word followed by "it", and wear the damn khakis instead.

In game terms that means setting the expectation for the players that they should never feel comfortable that I have made any effort at all to matching the challenge of the villains to the party's ability; feel free to run. So my happy group of 4th-lvlers may meet 3 plain old orc warriors. That's an encounter. Then next they may meet a cocaine-amped, 16th level fire giant barbarian who just caught his wife cheating on him, and she only gave him this ridiculously huge greatsword and 3 heal potions to say she's sorry. And the dogs. That's also an encounter.

The point is, whether the party is barely making it through the encounter, breezing through, expending precisely 20% of their resources to make it through, or running, as long as it's fun then who cares? Believe me, players really love to romp through low-level fodder more than anything. And running from the second encounter is at least as memorable.

No one cares, in the end, about CRs and ECLs. Not even about experience points really, since in 10 or 20 or 30 years what they remember is "One time our group was just roaming around the land, and we run into this really pissed giant...".

So I really appreciate all the time and effort to balance the classes, the monsters, the game. It is a truly daunting, thankless task that can never, IMO, be done to 100% accuracy. It is certainly better than before and bravo for that. But if I can't buy the whole suit, I'm sticking with the blue blazer and khakis.


--- John

I agree that fun is the end result, and I don't really care how I get there. Talking about balance is talking about fun though. By saying something is not balanced in my game, another way to say it is that it ruins the game by making it too easy. Or it allows one character to overshadow the other characters and making it less fun for them. Balance has its place as long as it does not over shadow the fun.

I agree...
I tell my players that I run a campaign WORLD. That means that not everything you run into is tailored for your level...
If your 3rd level and hear about a dragon rampaging the countryside doesn't mean your supposed to run off and kill the dragon.
Things happen in real life all the time that we are not prepared for and it's our job to know when we are in over our head and get out ASAP.
My campaign is no different...

As I see it, there are two types of balance.

The first deals with player interaction. If the wizard never gets to harm anything and is just lugged around, or the fighter is doing everything, then you have a problem. Although the DM may be partly to blame, often this is a problem with the rules. It is the main thing the 3E designers tried to do when they redesigned the game: make every character useful throughout their career.

This is the important part of balance.

The second deals with party vs. monster balance. This is where you want combats and interaction to be interesting and not walk-overs. This lies far more in the province of the DM than the rules (although some rules or spells may make it too one-sided), because the DM chooses the types of challenges faced.

The second kind is where CR comes in, and it really should be emphasised even further than it is at the moment that this is merely a GUIDELINE, based on an average party. I find it an invaluable guideline, but need not be slavishly followed.

Cheers!

Gosh I wish one of my players , Miller that means you, were here...He wrote down a quote of mine describing just how much I dont cater to players by tailoring the world to them...

John,

Consider me you new best friend! Now that being said howse about you convert to the Scarred Lands eh? (Need to fill my quota.)

MerricB said:

As I see it, there are two types of balance.

The first deals with player interaction. If the wizard never gets to harm anything and is just lugged around, or the fighter is doing everything, then you have a problem. Although the DM may be partly to blame, often this is a problem with the rules. It is the main thing the 3E designers tried to do when they redesigned the game: make every character useful throughout their career.

This is the important part of balance.

The second deals with party vs. monster balance. This is where you want combats and interaction to be interesting and not walk-overs. This lies far more in the province of the DM than the rules (although some rules or spells may make it too one-sided), because the DM chooses the types of challenges faced.

The second kind is where CR comes in, and it really should be emphasised even further than it is at the moment that this is merely a GUIDELINE, based on an average party. I find it an invaluable guideline, but need not be slavishly followed.

Cheers!

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Wow! Iget to pick one with Merric on another board! Hoody Hoo!

Bullpucky!

Who ever said that all characters should be useful throughout their careers. Fantasy literature abounds with mismatched "unbalanced" characters. IMNSHO, rather than being "the important part of balance" it's one of the major flaws in the system for me. I like to play those useless spell-lobbers so I can savor the power later if I'm clever enough that they survive. Same with a tricky thief. All men are not created equal and neither should be characters!

On the second point, CR will never replace experience. I beat my characters to within an inch of their miserable lives and rarely kill one by overpowering them. That's not to say I won't throw something in their way to see if they're more intelligent than brave. By the same token, they don't get "walk-overs" unless I intend it. To me, CR's are about as significant andaccurate as a blind man's estimate of the distance to the moon based on odor! You gotta kill a few to discover the right "balance." Nothin' substitutes for experience.

jdfrenzel said:

BALANCE SCHMALANCE.

That felt good.

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Great post. I think we were well past the good-enough point with 3.0.

francisca said:

Great post. I think we were well past the good-enough point with 3.0.

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Like I said, my new best friend!

I just wanted to pick up on something bloodymage said:

Who ever said that all characters should be useful throughout their careers. Fantasy literature abounds with mismatched "unbalanced" characters. IMNSHO, rather than being "the important part of balance" it's one of the major flaws in the system for me. I like to play those useless spell-lobbers so I can savor the power later if I'm clever enough that they survive. Same with a tricky thief. All men are not created equal and neither should be characters!

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Well, let me see, I say so!

When I set aside time to role-play, I like to feel that my time at table was well spent, that it was worth my coming along, rather than being merely a decoration. In other words, I want my character to be able to do something! I want to be able to participate in the game, and not have to spend my time in the shadow of another because the rules are set up that way. That's why some balance in the design of the character classes matters.

Fantasy literature might abound with mismatched pairs, but then the author has the luxury of 'playing' every one of them during the writing process. As for the reader, well he gets to do the same as well, experiencing the story from each character's perspective through the pages. If you had to read a book written only from the perspective of a 'spear carrier', with hints that something amazing was happening that you weren't seeing, then that would be a little like the role of ineffectual PCs.

It's a different perspective on the gaming experience, I grant you. But it often seems that D&D was alone as a game in assuming that a wild mismatch in the power curves of PCs was acceptable if over the course of much play that players would get long periods of being effective and ineffective. Let's start with the assumption that all PCs are created equal, and then let's see through play whether they really are; let's not build it as a design feature of the game.