D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[Umbran]

So while most players probably don't want their characters to be upstaged, there are still a significant number of us who don't care about that sort of balance.

Maybe I didn't make myself sufficiently clear.

Players, I think, generally want to contribute cool stuff to the game. So, in your game with large technical power disparity, if those with less power were still able to meaningfully engage, and not be stuck in the situation in which the powerful characters do all the meaningful activity, and the lower-powered ones just watch, then you're still in line with what I mentioned.

What you seem to miss is that, most of the time, folks probably don't care much how the equity in play I am talking about is arranged. What we normally call "balance" is one tool that can help*. But it is not the only tool available.

If you and your groups were using other tools, techniques, and patterns of play to get to the result, that's cool, and is exactly what I'm talking about.




* I lean toward a definition of "balance" that says that the more balanced a game is, the less overt attention participants have to pay to making sure everyone can meaningfully contribute to the outcomes.

 

[Voadam]

That's a fighter with ~12 strength vs a fighter with 18/## strength .. yeah that's a huge gulf regardless of edition. I guess the positive is if gauntlets of ogre power come up the 18/## fighter will probably let you take them
Though balance can mean different things to different people though, especially between a player and a GM.

You are probably thinking of B/X for the 12 strength, not the reverse bell curve of the AD&D strength chart where you don't get any bonuses until you hit 16 strength.

I think I actually had a 17 strength so +1 to hit and +1 to damage, the equivalent of a 12 strength in 3e-5e. So not quite zero bonus

I remember having to hit 1 HD humanoids a couple times repeatedly while the other guy was one shotting them every time with a little better bonus to hit as well.

For comparison the B/X chart:

 

[Blue]

First, balance is something that happens between characters -- it has zero to do with difficulty. Not sure why some people are bringing that up.

Second, the wider RPG meaning of balance is that the spotlight time given by the mechanics (as opposed to other parts of the game where a character get the spotlight) is somewhat even over time.

This wider definition is really important because those who play games primarily like D&D can think it has to do with combat balance. This is a distortion caused by combat-to-the-death as a common stake, so the most mechanically important part of the game is combat. So it twists the idea of balance to primarily there, with for some with a wider viewpoint also including utility in other parts as a secondary.

(Mind you, even in the pure combat definition, players want balance. If you ask any player to always be two levels behind everyone else, the majority will say no. They want to be on equal footing, unless trying something for the experience. The idea that players want balance is pretty trivially settled with questions like this.)

But if you look at games in genres where common stakes don't include the potential for character death, you get a wider understanding. A common example I use is Marvel Heroic Roleplay: you can have a buddy night's out with Thor and Hawkeye going drinking, with high jinks provided by Loki, and both players can have loads of fun. Are Thor and Hawkeye "balanced" against each other in power? Heck no. But both of the players will have their character get spotlight due to what they do mechanically about even, because that's how the system is built.

Bringing that back to D&D, look at the evolution of the cleric (into a wider base of healing classes) over the editions of D&D. A cleric was a required contributor in early editions, and carried their weight. But they had less (but still some) flashy change-the-course-of-the-scene mechanical options, so got less spotlight. And often people didn't want to play them because of that. So they got more power -- even though already an equal contributor -- to make them more attractive == give them more spotlight.

Players don't want mechanics that give others big moments but not themselves. They want balance. I'm approaching it from the "do you want to be less" side because that's more universal. Some players would be fine without balance as long as they are the ones who benefit, while others are more team-minded, so the "more" side is fraught with personality traits that impact the ability to form a consistent picture.

 

[tetrasodium]

Obviously this depends on the player- I once tried to explain the purpose behind the gritty rest rules, that decoupling rest from sleep made it easier for the GM to challenge the players' resources etc etc etc. The response I got was "you want to make things more difficult for us?!" Not that the reaction was THAT bad, but it demonstrated to me that unless someone is a player AND GM that they probably don't think about the other side of the screen that much... Consequently the only reason IME that they would consider "balance" is if it's apparent that some characters are blatantly outshining others.

I have had players come to me with concerns about their character, the A5E Berserker for example, and say "it's obvious this is way too good, better than everyone else, how can we tone this down?"

Just personal experience of course

That has largely been my experience with any effort to use rules like that (including that one specifically). Players rarely understand why it's a desirable change. Without understanding it they quickly realize that the perceived unreasonable nerf can be beaten simply by ignoring it entirely and carrying on as if nothing changed. Sure resting takes longer, but if the players run dry ASAP then cross their arms and say some flavor of 'we are taking a rest [I dare you to make it matter] it creates an impasse. Once the players start treating the change as a bluff there isn't much the gm can do to make it matter without driving a spike through the game and reinforcing the bad assumptions driving that resistance as both justified and reasonable.

 

[Distracted DM]

That has largely been my experience with any effort to use rules like that (including that one specifically). Players rarely understand why it's a desirable change. Without understanding it they quickly realize that the perceived unreasonable nerf beaten simply by ignoring it entirely and carrying on as if nothing changed. Sure resting takes longer, but if the players run dry ASAP then cross their arms and say some flavor of 'we are taking a rest [I dare you to make it matter]. Once the players start treating ithe change as a bluff there isn't much the gm can do to make it matter without driving a spike through the game and reinforcing the bad assumptions driving that resistance as both justified and reasonable.

Agreed.

To clarify, I do run with long rests taking at least a couple days as a matter of course now, I made the switch almost a year ago- but a week ago someone commented on it and I tried to explain the reasoning behind such decisions.. I realized pretty quickly the above; they couldn't think about it from my perspective of trying to challenge them better, just from their perspective as players trying to succeed.

So just run the game the way you'd enjoy it being run, and hopefully your players enjoy the overall result, even if they won't appreciate the minutiae of why you do things the way you do.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Agreed.

To clarify, I do run with long rests taking at least a couple days as a matter of course now, I made the switch almost a year ago- but a week ago someone commented on it and I tried to explain the reasoning behind such decisions.. I realized pretty quickly the above; they couldn't think about it from my perspective of trying to challenge them better, just from their perspective as players trying to succeed.

So just run the game the way you'd enjoy it being run, and hopefully your players enjoy the overall result, even if they won't appreciate the minutiae of why you do things the way you do.

I really like the idea of lengthening long rests if you want people to wear down and make hard decisions…


Follow up question/ edit:

How to you do multi day recovery? Partial each day or non until multiple rests?

 

[Zardnaar]

You are probably thinking of B/X for the 12 strength, not the reverse bell curve of the AD&D strength chart where you don't get any bonuses until you hit 16 strength.

View attachment 382488

I think I actually had a 17 strength so +1 to hit and +1 to damage, the equivalent of a 12 strength in 3e-5e. So not quite zero bonus

I remember having to hit 1 HD humanoids a couple times repeatedly while the other guy was one shotting them every time with a little better bonus to hit as well.

For comparison the B/X chart:

View attachment 382489

I like OSR playstyle. Do not like AD&D ability score tables.

My PCs average +1/+1/+2 I think on B/X type rays. One has +2/+1+/+1/+1.

 

[Sulicius]

You'll get lots of different answers, and it depends on whether you're speaking from a player or GM perspective, but balance in design looks like: all options are good choices. That is, there are no trap features, that look useful but are actually awful. There are no choices that are so much better than everything else that you'd be intentionally hamstringing yourself by not taking them.
It's hard to do without making everything bland, but it can be done. Subclasses, for example: some are so good that they outshine every other subclass.. like the Zeal domain or some stuff from Tasha's. iirc the Purple Dragon Knight is the opposite.

Good answer! But what makes each option good will depend on the player and the campaign, right?

Sure, it is easy to measure damage, but how do you measure sky write?

 

[The Sigil]

That has largely been my experience with any effort to use rules like that (including that one specifically). Players rarely understand why it's a desirable change. Without understanding it they quickly realize that the perceived unreasonable nerf can be beaten simply by ignoring it entirely and carrying on as if nothing changed. Sure resting takes longer, but if the players run dry ASAP then cross their arms and say some flavor of 'we are taking a rest [I dare you to make it matter] it creates an impasse. Once the players start treating the change as a bluff there isn't much the gm can do to make it matter without driving a spike through the game and reinforcing the bad assumptions driving that resistance as both justified and reasonable.

Part of the problem seems to be that people see D&D as a “game” and when people play games, they want to “win.” I can’t recall where, but I saw a YouTube video on game design and balance where the psychology of games was discussed and I recall the statement that “players perceive a PVP game to be balanced not when they win 50% of the time, but instead when they win 70% of the time.”

Obviously, in a well balanced PVP game “fair” would be a 50% win rate (assuming similar skill). This means psychologically, players are poor judges of game balance as they are biased in favor of themselves.

D&D is seen mostly as a combat simulator and therefore players only think it is “fair” when they (or their characters) are at a significant statistical advantage in combat - and at least since 3e introduced challenge rating we actually saw that codified in the rules - a character of level X was a CR X encounter, and a “balanced” encounter for a party with 4 PCs of Level X is a CR X encounter… so fights are only “balanced”when the PCs have a 4:1 advantage. This is lunacy.

We need to divorce ourselves and the players from the notion that the game is “fair” when we are massively advantaged. Perhaps we do this be reframing the balance conversation away from “can you win a straight up fight” and toward the 50% success rule of “do you expect half your characters to die in the course of a typical adventuring day? If not, the game is not balanced.” This takes us closer toward older editions where it was less about “winning all the fights” and more about “surviving is victory” as our fairness criteria and knowing 1 retreat is an option and 2 there is a 50/50 chance I won’t even make it out alive.

I mean, Rogue One was a much more compelling story to me than Episode 7 of Star Wars… because you actually felt like there were stakes and a noble death can be more satisfying as a story than running through a story successfully thanks to Plot Armor.

 

[tetrasodium]

Good answer! But what makes each option good will depend on the player and the campaign, right?

Sure, it is easy to measure damage, but how do you measure sky write?

I once saw skywrite used with stunning effectiveness to evac civilians from a town where leadership had decided it was hostile to the party. Forget the specific wording but it promised horrible things & indiscriminate wide area spells like fireball firewall & so on.

That Weird edge case efficacy was once offset by the opportunity cost imposed by Vancian casting style prep & now the the opportunity cost of keeping it prepared to cast is nearly zero once the caster has their daily driver spells prepped