D&D 5E (2014) What is balance to you, and why do you care (or don't)?

[GMforPowergamers]

, the 2nd level ranger used her turn to carry the 8th level ranger's beast companion closer to the enemy so the beast could then successfully reach the enemy

how did you end up with characters 6 levels apart?

 

[Ondath]

To me, balance is less science and more art. An encounter feels balanced when it poses sufficient difficulty compared to its stakes. With that said, I don't balance my encounters around the party's abilities, but around the world's expectations. Each "leg" of a challenge exists at its own tier, where each tier's encounters are balanced around challenging a 4-person party of a specific level. The first tier was balanced around 4 players of Level 2, the second was around 4 players of Level 4, the next one was 4 players of Level 7, and so on. Changing to this style from trying to balance everything around my own party has had a few benefits:

• The world feels a bit more believable, with a Gygaxian naturalism-like evolution hierarchy of monster and faction strengths. If the party messes up and angers a dragon that's 2 tiers above them, that's their problem. But I do try and telegraph the danger in these cases before the party would inevitably lose. But if the party makes up their mind to tackle the bigger threat and somehow still win, they get much bigger rewards.
• The fact that I don't balance around the party's current level but specific levels also had the effect of giving encounter difficulty some ebb-and-flow in each tier. If the party is dealing with an evil group that's a Tier 3 (balanced around Level 7) threat when they're Level 6, the encounters first feel a bit difficult. When they get to Level 7, they feel like they're a match to the enemies, When the party hits Level 8, they can really flex on their enemies and get to feel cool. When they hit Level 9 and search for new adventures, new threats are balanced around level 10, so the flow of difficulty starts anew.
• A5E's Challenge Rating system is insanely easy with this system. When I want to create a Tier 3 encounter, I know I'll make a Medium encounter for 4 Level 7 PCs. That means the monsters in that encounter should have a total CR of 9 or 10. I grab whichever monsters fit that bill and my encounter is ready. It's super simple.

This is not a perfect system, and my party does clown on some encounters that I was hoping would challenge them sometimes. But they get to do that because they played smart, and I'd be a bad DM if I didn't let them get the rewards for their good play.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

how did you end up with characters 6 levels apart?

It is a West Marches CoS/Ravenloft campaign where each player can have up to 3 active PCs. A different combo of players and PCs is present each session and only those PCs present for a session earn XP (or, if a PC dies, the player can give their XP to one of their other PCs). The 8th level character has survived since the start of the campaign (Jan 2021). The 2nd level PC is run by a newer player who created the character a month ago (and just hit 3rd level last session). We use session based XP for ease of tracking.

 

[Guest 7034872]

I don't really have strong opinions on game balance, but over the past few years I have come to something like el-remmen's position: I don't want any one player, group of players, spells, or abilities to take over the whole game, but I also don't want all players, spells, etc. always to be equally powerful. The beauty of clever combos is in the way they short-circuit the ordinary game balance, and I never want to discourage my players' cleverness in devising such tricks. I think of it analogously to M:tG: if there are no heavy power cards and combos, the game loses its appeal.

So I do want to be careful about maintaining a certain measure of balance, but never so much that sneaky/clever players can't break the game and take us all to unexpected places. I like unexpected places.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I also don't want all players, spells, etc. always to be equally powerful.

I don't understand this. I understand you may mean a small gradient (and I am cool with it being small) but I can't help but imagine Monte Cook laughing at a new players who choose 'trap choices'.

If I have 2 wizards and 1 take Fireball, and the other takes Haste, those are two powerful and very different spells but if someone grabs a 3rd level spell that does something no where near as useful... that is a problem. My go to example is magic circle I took it on my first 3 spell casters to get to 3rd level spells and got to use it like once. It FEELs like it should be cool, but if the DM doesn't set it up it is hard to use... and you can use it to fireball/counterspell/haste at the same level.

I gave a player Magic Circle at will in a game and we STILL only saw it used a few times

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But the goal of balance is for every player to have, over time, to have roughly the same amount of time in the spotlight and equal fun.

Building off the already stated "Batman and Superman" vs "Janitor Joe and Superman," one of my big issues is generally that it is actually really HARD to actually pull this off. That is, Batman on paper reads like a ridiculous Mary Sue: "I'm a world-class, beyond-Olympic athlete, one of the smartest men in the world, attractive, rich beyond the dreams of Avarice such that my entire superhero lifestyle can be hidden in a line item in the financial reports of my global business conglomerate. My parents were killed when I was eight which is what gave me the motivation to save others from suffering that kind of loss. Oh, and the man who raised me is a badass former British secret service agent, my adopted son is a similarly orphaned incredibly gifted gymnast and overall very sharp kid, and my main love interest is one of the world's leading catburglars and also a rich socialite with her own multimillion corporation." By comparison even Superman, the Man of Steel himself, begins to sound surprisingly restrained.

Playing favorites in this way in order to compensate for the phenomenal cosmic power of magic has a very real risk of fostering jealousy...and of course the irony is that both sides can develop bitter feelings toward the other. Like siblings who each resent the other because the younger one got all the attention and forgiven for all their errors, but the elder got all the authority and respect.

Changing to this style from trying to balance everything around my own party

I mean, I'm probably in the top five advocates for balance on this board, and I will always tell people to STOP doing this because it's not good gameplay....so....good?

The two most pernicious falsehoods about game balance are that it has to be perfect and is thus impossible (when, in truth, balance within a defined acceptable range is both totally achievable and very effective), and that it must be keyed lockstep to player progression (which is patently ridiculous and leads to a greatly impoverished experience).

I don't want any one player, group of players, spells, or abilities to take over the whole game, but I also don't want all players, spells, etc. always to be equally powerful. The beauty of clever combos is in the way they short-circuit the ordinary game balance, and I never want to discourage from my players' cleverness in devising such tricks. I think of it analogously to M:tG: if there are no heavy power cards and combos, the game loses its appeal.

So I do want to be careful about maintaining a certain measure of balance, but never so much that sneaky/clever players can't break the game and take us all to unexpected places. I like unexpected places.

I value all of those things too. I see literally nothing that prevents such behavior in a well-balanced game. Indeed, your use of M:TG is a lovely example, because it IS a game that strives very hard for balance so that those clever plays have greater impact. When a game is unbalanced, it features dominant strategies, which will crowd out other approaches unless someone finds a way to make a non-dominant strategy so massively useful that it can't be ignored. In a well-balanced game, by contrast, subtle interplay becomes the key difference between victory and defeat; the small contextual differences matter, and a careful plan that actually factors in the situation at hand will almost always be superior to just following the tried and true playbook.

Or, to put a spin on Anna's lessons in the Art to Atrus, "Balanced systems stimulate creativity and strategy."

 

[Ondath]

I mean, I'm probably in the top five advocates for balance on this board, and I will always tell people to STOP doing this because it's not good gameplay....so....good?

The two most pernicious falsehoods about game balance are that it has to be perfect and is thus impossible (when, in truth, balance within a defined acceptable range is both totally achievable and very effective), and that it must be keyed lockstep to player progression (which is patently ridiculous and leads to a greatly impoverished experience).

I think the way the discourse around 5E combat design has evolved has had a pernicious effect on this. Notably, 5E DMG gives you some complicated math to allow you to calculate an encounter's balance to your specific party, and the 3rd-party encounter planners also gave this idea that you input your party's configuration and balanced everything around them - this was certainly how I designed my encounters for the first few years I DM'd. It was only after reading an article by the Angry GM that talked about the difficulty treadmill and how to avoid it that I realised that the tiered system I'm currently using would feel more fun.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

This is a great discussion and it reminds me of a Matt Colville video he made where he talked about the problem talking about D&D is that generally everyone, whether they like it or not, plays their own version of D&D, between house rules, or setting parameters, play styles, etc.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I generally agree with those that have said that balance is not a goal in and of itself and that over-focus on balance is perhaps putting the cart before the horse.

That said, a theoretical 'balance isn't important' mindset is how we got TSR-era* Thieves -- a play option that is needed** in a party (and to which plenty of gamers gravitate, thematically), gets one type of spotlight time that they might (depending on which version) actually be good at, but overall really underperformed, and were un-fun enough as-written that many game tables had houserule fixes, and many OSR games mirror the TSR norm except for Thieves in some way.
*post oD&D w/o supplement I
**although certain DMs (particularly those that started with oD&D) might allow other classes to do the things for which one might choose a Thief class simply be describing , which certainly doesn't improve the Thief's lot.

That's the general limitation of '_____ isn't important' or 'all that matters is that people have fun' points -- oftentimes specific game rules can end up making balance important, and lack balance can conspire to make things un-fun. Yes, we over-obsess about balance on forums and the like, but that doesn't make it not a concern.

I think there is generally a middle ground -- Balance is a component of the overall structure of the game. Game structure, as a whole, in a perfect gaming group with a perfect (-ly prepared and quick-thinking) GM, rarely matter. The farther one gets from that scenario, the more the specific structures of the game rules help keep the game from becoming lopsided in some way (which can, although not always, lead to things being un-fun).

Thor and Hawkeye fighting on the same team, even against the same villains is, sadly an artificial construct. While Hawkeye's skills are beyond impressive, he needs a plot coupon, like a special Negative Zone arrow or something, to be able to even faze most of Thor's rogues gallery.

I've always seen this working in-universe as sometimes, Superman is too much for certain threats. The risk of him accidentally using his powers to seriously maim or harm "street-level" thugs, means it's important to have a wide variety of skills and powers available to a team (and if you need to see what unrestrained supers can do, The Boys is a good example).

MCU Hawkeye suffers from 'why is he here?' having become part of his character, although they did an okay job of making his 'he has a family, reminding the others of why they fight for good, etc.' schtick a big deal. Marvel comics in general have always hewed pretty close to being about the interpersonal relationships and struggles superheroes have while being superheroes as mostly a backdrop (Chris Claremont era X-Men made Nightcrawler interesting and Angel boring, despite them both having oft-not-even-used transport powers, simply because the writers happened to like Nightcrawler).

Supes vs. Batman does more 'actual contribution' effects for Batman, and tend to lean into situations where invulnerability and super-power don't factor in as much as knowing where to be or what to do or other detective + contacts kinda stuff. D&D could do similar (and honestly, if you count OOC magic as similar, already does).

 

[Willie the Duck]

This is a great discussion and it reminds me of a Matt Colville video he made where he talked about the problem talking about D&D is that generally everyone, whether they like it or not, plays their own version of D&D, between house rules, or setting parameters, play styles, etc.

This makes it phenomenally hard to balance the system, certainly for the developers. Lots of playstyles that mutually exclusively reward specific decisions. A lot of games deliberately constrain their intended scope specifically to deal with this.