How important is game balance to you?

[Celebrim]

In my experience, the players and DMs that view it as a competition instead of collaboration have been some of the worst I’ve gamed with.

In my opinion, if you don't think balance is important to collaborative games, you haven't played a lot of collaborative games. Balance if anything is more important in a collaborative game because differences in player skill can't smooth over balance issues in a competitive game (ei, it's still fun to play checkers if you go second). In a collaborative game, you have to have two sorts of balance - spot light balance, so that each role in the collaborative game is attractive and interesting to play, and even more importantly scenario balance, so that you strike the right note between the game scenario being challenging and manageable. No one wants to play a 4 hour collaborative game, only to discover that the win conditions are essentially impossible, or that the only way to win is to get super lucky in the first 5 minutes. Likewise, no one wants to play a 4 hour collaborative game that always results in the 'heroes' winning regardless of how they play. You still want to 'earn' your victory in a collaborative game.

 

[GMMichael]

Imagine you are playing a martial arts computer game - lets call it 'Karateka'. Initially, you are amazed by the smooth animation and the apparent depth of the combat system. You can make high, low, and side kicks, straight punches, upper cuts, and body punches. You can make blocks. You can assume a fighting stance, run, bow and so forth. And the game is different than a lot games you've played, in that once you commit to an action, you have to finish it before you can do anything else. So you have to plan ahead. And your foes have the exact same moves you do. You have to out think them.

You could have told me this 30 years ago. Thanks.

Finding the optimal combination is fun. Outshining the rest of the group is not fun. A good GM can overcome a small amount of imbalance, while the best GM can't much fix a broken game. I don't want all actions to boil down to "roll your d6," but what if there are multiple ways to optimize, so one character's bane is another's boon?

 

[MichaelSomething]

In terms of combat, buffers, healers and defenders get the spotlight a lot less than then characters that do something flashier, but people like playing them and people like having them in their party.

Are they inherently imbalanced?

Balance doesn't mean everything is the same. It means everything is equal, or equally useful.

You're also getting into role balance, but that's a whole other thing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Game balance can be a controversial topic. Some feel it is paramount, while others feel it is just a tool among many.

I don't think it's really controversial in that sense. Everyone realizes on some level that a game needs to be at least somewhat fair, and that a game as complex as an RPG needs to be balanced. 'Realizes' in the sense that they'll notice they're not having much fun playing a game that's unfair (especially to them) or imbalanced (likewise). The controversy comes in because imbalance in a complex game can be leveraged by those who understand it. And, because designing a balanced game and retaining balance when modifying it is /hard/. If you're not up to the challenge, its very tempting to 'sacrifice balance' for some other quality (sometimes it's even the right call, examples below). If you're vested in imbalance, it can, similarly, be justified by a refusal to allow some other quality (real or imagined) to be 'sacrificed for balance.' You can even go on about a game being 'too balanced.'

And, people can buy into that. When you think about it, a game as complex as an RPG has a lot of qualities, a lot of elements that make it up, a lot of different approaches to enjoying it. For almost any gamer, there's probably some quality that seems more important than balance. So, if you're trying to justify imbalance (not prioritizing balance, say), you can pretty easily get a majority of players to agree that balance may be important, but there are 'other things' that are more important. As long as you don't give them a chance to try to hammer out a consensus of even slightly objective qualities that they can agree are more important than balance, because they're going to have a very wide range of priorities, indeed. Of course, there's always the resort to subjective qualities. Especially 'fun.' Everyone knows a game is about fun, and fun is a subjective experience, so we can all agree fun is more important than balance (or whatever other quality you don't want to put in the effort to design into your game, or need to sacrifice for something else). But it's meaningless, because 'fun' is a chimera, it's different for everyone, you can't design it in, no matter how much balance or how many other objective qualities you sacrifice at its altar.

Personally, I feel that these days folks seem to view balance as the end goal, while I feel it's just part of the toolset.

Balance is hardly the goal, it's just a very helpful quality that games can possess in varying degrees. You might even say that it's vital. Necessary for a good game, but not sufficient, in itself.

After all, a perfectly balanced game is this:

Everybody roll 1d6. Highest roll wins.

That's a very simple game. It's even a perfectly fair game. But it's not balanced at all. I suppose you could say it's not complex enough to have the quality of balance in the first place, let alone to have or lack it to a given degree...

...but, I've gotten way ahead of myself. First, we need a workable definition of 'balanced' to really make sense of it. One definition I came across that seems to work really well, for me, is this:

A game is better-balanced the more choices (in both relative and absolute terms) that are both meaningful and viable that it offers players.

Your example offers no choices at all, so lacks balance, completely. It is, however, fair - each player has an equal chance of winning.

Now, a game can offer many viable & meaningful choices, and /also/ many more choices that are non-viable but meaningful (or otherwise attractive to players). The number of meaningful & viable choices in such a game is relatively low (relative to the number of non-viable choices). You'll hear people criticizing such games for having 'traps,' and you'll hear others describe such a system as 'rewarding system mastery.'

Fun, eh?

Imbalanced games can be fun, actually, especially complex ones. Especially fun for those who have mastered them, when playing with others who have not. They can also be fun (more or less by accident) for those who haven't mastered them, but who all end up making choices they find meaningful, that happen to be viable relative to the choices each of the others have made. Amusing, that. (Even weirder, an imbalanced game can yield a balanced meta-game among system masters, a sort of emergent balance, once all the traps and chaff have been eliminated from consideration.)

Better-balanced games, OTOH, can be fun for everyone playing them, masters or not.

How do you feel about balance?

Obviously I've thought a lot about it. Pardoxically, I find it very important, but not a goal or a be-all and end-all of design. It's just something you shouldn't screw up or sacrifice trying to accomplish your actual goals (unless your goal /is/ imbalance - imbalance does serve goals like rewarding system mastery, and can be leveraged to serve other, softer goals, as well). That is, if your goal is to create a good game. Being good in that technical sense isn't always an important goal.

A more important goal if your writing professionally is to appeal to an audience. There's really no telling what might do that, but, hey, if one imbalanced game is wildly successful (by the standards of the market for such complex games as RPGs, so that might not be saying much), then it's worth trying another that's imbalanced in similar ways. WotC, for instance, was very successful with M:tG, which featured, among other things, attractive-distractors, cards that looked cool or useful, but were really sub-par. "Timmeh cards." Traps. The presence of non-viable but at-least-seamingly-meaningful options deepened the system mastery element of play, creating a balanced, and challenging meta-game. It's hardly surprising that they designed 3.x along similar lines. (And, no, I didn't just make all that up, have to give Monte Cook credit for those insights - Ivory Tower Game Design, he goes into it in laying the foundation for his main point, but it's interesting in its own right.)


Rewarding system mastery may sound a little cynical, but it's not the only reason to design imbalance into a game intentionally. (Not just design, either, but modify - we DMs love modding D&D, and often, what we're doing is inserting imbalances, intentionally, with good reason.) If you want to influence player choices, one obvious way is to make some choices more attractive - either more meaningful or interesting (qualitatively) or 'cool' (highly subjective) or simply more effective (quantitatively). Take the game I started with and still love: 1e AD&D. It was the first RPG, and it was a medieval fantasy RPG. One of the classic archetypes is the knight in armor, another is the hero with a sword (not just any sword, the high-middle-ages cruciform swords we all saw in Ivanhoe - because 'we' here is contemporaries of Gygax and Arneson). The game doesn't just give you perfectly realistic choices or perfectly balanced choice and trust you to choose plate armor and a long sword because that's the image in the genre. It makes Plate 'Mail' the best armor in the game, and it weights the magic item tables to make longswords the most frequently-found (and most varied, and among the most powerful) magic weapons in the game. That's imbalanced, it's making choices like specializing in the Glaive-Guisearme into 'traps' - but serves a purpose, by narrowing the scope of play, without narrowing the sweep of the setting.

 

[Jhaelen]

The market leaders of TTRPGs have had class based systems since the beginning. If balance mattered there would be far more point buy systems at the top of the sales charts.

You mean _the_ market leader, i.e. D&D, I guess.
I also think you're wrong, because it's a lot harder to properly balance point-buy systems than it is to balance a class-based system: A class comes with a whole bundle of stuff, some of them great, some of them not so great, but you have to take them all because they're part of the package.
In a point-buy system you can be more picky, carefully constructing an OP character by combining abilities that synergize extremely well - and often better than the designers ever intended.

 

[Jhaelen]

In terms of combat, buffers, healers and defenders get the spotlight a lot less than then characters that do something flashier, but people like playing them and people like having them in their party.

Are they inherently imbalanced?

To the contrary I'd argue that they're extremely well-balanced, assuming each role is similarly important for them to succeed in combat.

But why do believe that people like playing buffers and healers? That's totally not my experience. D&D 4e is the only RPG system/edition where I notice that interest in playing a leader is about as high as playing a class filling some other role. And the reason is easy to see: They don't have to be _dedicated_ healers. It's the opposite of D&D 3e where a cleric was hardly more than a buff-/healbot. In 3e we were basically drawing straws to decide who'd have to fill this unpopular role.

And in our 4e group, the defender is definitely getting the limelight very often. It's true that our main striker often evokes more awe because he's the one killing most of the opposition, but everyone realizes it's the defender's expertise that allows the striker to do so. The defender is also the one character that our DM is complaining about the most because it's so hard to scratch or disable him even temporarily.

 

[aramis erak]

You mean _the_ market leader, i.e. D&D, I guess.
I also think you're wrong, because it's a lot harder to properly balance point-buy systems than it is to balance a class-based system: A class comes with a whole bundle of stuff, some of them great, some of them not so great, but you have to take them all because they're part of the package.
In a point-buy system you can be more picky, carefully constructing an OP character by combining abilities that synergize extremely well - and often better than the designers ever intended.

let's see.. spring 2016 top 5 seller RPGs from ICV2...
1 Dungeons and Dragons (Wizards of the Coast)
2 Pathfinder (Paizo)
3 Star Wars (Fantasy Flight Games)
4 Shadowrun (Catalyst Game Labs)
5 Fantasy/Dragon Age (Green Ronin)

1,2,5: Class and level
3 class† but not level.
4 archetypes and priorities based.

Oldest 6 games I personally know of still being sold:
1 D&D
2 T&T
3 Traveller (GDW then, FFE now)
4 RuneQuest (Chaosium)
5 Starships & Spacemen (FGU then, Goblinoid now)
D&D, T&T, S&S: Class & Level
Traveller: Class†, but not level.
RQ: skills only

FFG SW is class/subclass, race & points combo
Traveller was nearly pure random after picking career to attempt to enter. You don't build them, you discover them from your dice rolling...
Shadowrun was Priorities (a specific subset of point build‡)
D&D has a point build option for attributes, as well as array‡, in 3E and later.
S&S, T&T, D&D, RQ: random rolls to generate characters in older editions.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
† Career, which determines skills/talents available in SW and skills available in Traveller
‡ Shadowrun Priorities are in fact a restricted choice point build, and dropping the restriction was an option in SR 1/2/3... Likewise D&D Array is a subset of D&D point build attributes.

 

[Blue]

Balance doesn't mean everything is the same. It means everything is equal, or equally useful.

You're also getting into role balance, but that's a whole other thing.

I was looking for a definition of balance, and you came up with "equal". To me that's equally nebulous in the context of an RPG where you aren't comparing similar things. Can you illuminate me?

 

[Celebrim]

Finding the optimal combination is fun. Outshining the rest of the group is not fun.

We should probably first pause and say that to some players, "Outshining the rest of the group" is the whole point of playing. I call this group "ego gamers", but to be less demeaning lets just say that they have self-validation as their sole aesthetic goal of play. To this group, balance in a game is terrible. What they want is a game that lets them be a brokenly powerful character that can assume all narrative power in the game, asserting their will on the game. The other players in the game are there only to witness their awesome might, and the DM in the group is there only to validate the awesomeness of their plans. If the game were balanced, they wouldn't be able to use the system to achieve their desired goals.

I'm sure its very thrilling for them, but it usually makes for dysfunctional cooperative games. In a non-RPG, this player tends to want to play everyone's characters. In an RPG, this player wants to be the sole player playing the character that rolls a d20, while all other characters roll a d6.

A good GM can overcome a small amount of imbalance, while the best GM can't much fix a broken game.

Very small amounts of imbalance can be fixed by focus fire or scenario manipulation or providing outlets for other skills to shine. But there is a limit to this. First, focus fire and scenario manipulation are inherently unfair, and the player with the imbalanced character may rightly be upset that he's being metagamed against simply because of his system mastery. Second, focus fire and scenario manipulation themselves shift spotlight, and can end up being counterproductive as the game is increasingly (literally) more about that one character. Providing outlets for other characters to shine can be good, but it doesn't tend to promote cooperative problem solving, can slow the pace of the story, and may end up producing a game that isn't the game everyone wanted to play. And ultimately, if the system is really broken, none of that matters because the character can overcome any challenge anyway.

I don't want all actions to boil down to "roll your d6," but what if there are multiple ways to optimize, so one character's bane is another's boon?

Then you have RoShamBo balance. This can work out fine if the opportunities for each player to shine are roughly equal. You have a Fighter that excels against Brutes, but is weak against Swarms, a Wizard that excels against Swarms but is weak against Snipers, and a Rogue that excels against Snipers but is weak against Brutes. This works well in simple games where you can control exactly what powers each role has, but gets increasingly hard to accomplish in an RPG as the number of character building options increase. Still, it's one tool for creating balance in an RPG. In my current game, one PC doesn't do a lot of damage, but he does it very reliably. He tends to not shine against things with lots of hit points but poor defenses, while shining in the reverse case. Another PC does very poorly against things that lack anatomy, but can quickly kill anything that is subject to critical hits. Another does well against things that aren't resistant to magic, but can be very weak against things that are. It's not a perfect Roshambo sort of situation, but each PC having strengths and weaknesses means that in any given encounter one PC might be the hero that the party is relying on the most.

Still, probably the hardest part of balance in a cooperative game isn't merely making the character important, but making all the roles equally fun to play. I was playing Zombiecide: Black Plague recently and while it was a pretty fun game, what I noticed is that while all six of the basic heroes have important roles to play in the team, they aren't equally fun to play. For example, the character whose shtick is 'I can tank' mostly has a passive role to play in the party and most likely ends up receiving as loot passive enhancements like armor. His job is to stand alongside the more active melee characters like the fighter and the paladin and take hits for them, or to go cover the ranged characters if they get overrun. That's important, but its largely a passive support role and other than the pride you might feel at saving someone else, it's probably not as enjoyable as the Ranger's consistent damage, the Wizard's late game nuclear strike options and overall utility, the Rogue or the Paladin's mobility or even the Fighter's brute force. The situation is not helped by the fact that the base game only has magic items that support the wizard and the ranger well. For that matter, while the Wizard is phenomenal in the mid to late game, your initial weapon is extremely weak and until you get some equipment it's easy to feel really useless or even helpless in the early game - sort of like old school D&D and its flawed assumption that you can achieve balance by making a class weak early on but strong later.

 

[cmad1977]

Meh. Depends.


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