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

[Retros_x]

I'm genuinely astonished that people thing players want a 100% or 90% chance at winning. This is unimaginable at my table. Each to their own but it strikes me as mind-numbingly boring.

If you really think that most tables want more than one TPK for every 10 combats (90% win rate) you live in a strong filter bubble.

Also I made a point that players THINK they want a fair fight, but most times they just want the illusion. If they would actually get completely defeated every 10th fight or even more, they would definitely feel its a really hard campaign - although that would match a 90% win rate.

 

[Lanefan]

The issue there is that Rogue One is a movie that you watch and D&D is a game where you create a character and embody them.

And when that character dies you can create another one and embody that.

As in: Jinn Urso's player from the Rogue One adventure rolls up Han Solo for the somewhat longer arc of adventures that starts with A New Hope; all still in the same greater campaign and following the same story threads.

 

[ptolemy]

I live in a bubble? Maybe. But I don’t understand why the opposite of a 90% win rate in any way suggests a tpk. I’ve only ever seen one of those because you have to be really bad at rpgs to not realise you can’t win and look for alternative. I mean shockingly bad. Do players want to feel like there is a path to victory, I’m pretty sure they often do (apart from survival games, CoC, games were society exists in a meaningful way) but should that mean a balanced encounter? How utterly dull. If you can’t kill the evil tyrant then the alternative is a tpk? Not, for example, inciting a revolution and bringing to bear the resources of the body politic. I admit, as a child I wanted to run in and fight the world. But seriously, “balance or tpk” is setting the bar so low I won’t even trip on it.

 

[Lanefan]

When?

In 3e when their niche was "Fighting Specific Enemies" (that may not show up in the game) and "Moving in Specific Terrain" (that may not be where the game takes place)?

Or in 2e when their role was to be slightly worse fighters and slightly worse rogues but decent at both in the wilderness?

Go back one more edition and Rangers rocked pretty good: their niche was woodscraft, tracking, and wilderness survival; they were solid front-liners; and they had a locked-in set of (what are now called) favoured enemies that were pretty much guaranteed to show up on a halfway regular basis.

It was 2e that ruined them, and they have yet to recover.

 

[Lanefan]

If you really think that most tables want more than one TPK for every 10 combats (90% win rate) you live in a strong filter bubble.

A 10% loss rate does not mean a TPK every 10 combats.

Far more likely, it means in a party that usually has 5 characters there's on average a character death every second combat (which is somewhat high even by my standards, but this is hypothetical, so let's continue). The party, however, continues; and the dead character is either revived or replaced.

 

[Zardnaar]

A 10% loss rate does not mean a TPK every 10 combats.

Far more likely, it means in a party that usually has 5 characters there's on average a character death every second combat (which is somewhat high even by my standards, but this is hypothetical, so let's continue). The party, however, continues; and the dead character is either revived or replaced.

Thats still a high rate.

You want the illusion of death unless the PCs are being blatantly stupid.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not a single player wants true game balance. That would mean a chess-like experience with a win-chance around 50% in a balanced match.

Is that "true" balance?

Or is it bad, lame, trivial balance?

Because I have always argued that it is the latter and not the former.

T impossible to achieve with asymmetric game design of DnD

Asymmetrical design can still be balanced, so long as "balance" is not interpreted to mean absolute perfection, but rather that the game design has been well-tested for achieving the goals the designers set. It's just significantly harder to balance asymmetrically, and requires more designer work.

What most player want when they say the want a balanced game is a win chance of 100% for an easy fight and a win chance of 90% for a hard fight. I am pulling completely exxagerated numbers out of my ** here to illustrate my point: They want the illusion of a fair fight, but come in with the expectation to win most fights. Which is the standard for most Dnd campaigns. Even if multiple TPK happen in one campaign, they win most fights.

I think the exaggeration here severely weakens your point, rather than enhancing it. You make players sound like petulant children who want nothing to ever go wrong, and I find that that is quite far from the truth. Instead, players want to feel like they have earned their victories, with two stipulations. First, they want it so that, as long as they were pursuing an actually reasonable end and genuinely putting in effort and skill and forethought, victory really was at least reasonably possible (so, no "oh sure you can win....if you roll two nat 20s in a row" type stuff). And second, they want it so that if they lost, it wasn't purely because of fickle whims of dice, though dice can play a non-determinative part; instead, if they failed to achieve their goals, they want it to be because they played badly and legitimately made unwise or self-inhibiting decisions (which may be fully intentional, depending on RP.)

You're correct that players want to win most fights, but it's a mistake to view "game balance" as being about giving two opponents equal chances of success. Game balance means that the design goals actually do succeed most of the time, up to reasonable limits given we're talking about randomness and the frequently-harebrained schemes of TTRPG players. A well-balanced game will generally have the players win (much) more often than they lose, because actually losing at anything like a symmetric rate is deeply demoralizing and un-fun to most people. A minority will most certainly be galvanized instead, but it's a small minority.

Good, effective game design--which is what a game being "balanced" means--results in most players usually having the intended experience even across a wide range of different inputs (player preferences, party compositions, threat levels, etc.) This is not some pie-in-the-sky pipe dream, nor is it something that axiomatically results in dull, flavorless crap. Obviously, doing this well requires work. That's literally what we pay game designers for.

 

[pemerton]

I was just thinking yesterday that the extreme focus on balance and nailing down every mechanic and spell removes a lot of the “magic” I remember from the game in the late 90s. Spells and magic items aren’t so mysterious and nebulous now as they were in 2e or B/X - they all have to have a firm rule with all the rough edges sanded down. We can’t just have a cloak that lets you meld into a shadow - it instead just gives you Advantage on Stealth rolls, or a +X modifier. To me that’s very, very boring.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about as far as magic items are concerned.

Moldvay Basic (p B50): Elven Cloak
Wearing the cloak will make a person nearly invisible . . . A character wearing an elven cloak will only seen on a roll 1 (on 1d6). After attacking, the wearer will be visible for the rest of the turn.

AD&D DMG (p 141): Cloak of Elvenkind
when it is worn, with the hood drawn up around the head, it enables the wearer to be nearly invisible . . . The invisibility bestowed is [a list of % chances by terrain and light follows].

AD&D UA (p 98): Cloak of the Bat
The cloak bestows upon its wearer a 90% probability of being invisible when the wearer is stationary within a shadowy or dark place.​

I don't see how the approach of linking the chance to hide to the general rules for stealth/hiding makes things less mysterious or nebulous.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And when that character dies you can create another one and embody that.

As in: Jinn Urso's player from the Rogue One adventure rolls up Han Solo for the somewhat longer arc of adventures that starts with A New Hope; all still in the same greater campaign and following the same story threads.

This is something that only works for some people, not for everyone.

Jyn Erso works as a character in part because we already know her sacrifice is worthwhile. It's almost always far too much to ask most audiences to care about protagonists that they know are totally, completely doomed and you don't even know if all the suffering they went through actually accomplished anything at all. Erso and Andor and K-2SO aren't pointless tragedies, they're noble, desperate ordinary people heroes who "fling a light into the future," preparing the way for A New Hope they will never personally see and which they can only have faith in because no rational evidence exists to prove it true. Their story is one of the extremely rare cases of hopeful dramatic irony.

You don't have that with the player whose Jyn Erso-alike dies pitifully on some random expedition for nothing-much-at-all. There is no noble sacrifice to even be something we could know or not know might succeed. There is no foreknowledge that that (nonexistent) sacrifice succeeded. And there is no "this is a world with both larger-than-life heroes and scared ordinary people who work together to change fate."

There's just a dead person, whose story has unceremoniously ended with a big fat load of Nothing Particularly Interesting. For a lot of audiences, that's the signal to put your time into something else, where Something Interesting actually gets to happen.

It is good for D&D to offer stuff to cater to that specialized taste, the "almost everyone dies without sense or meaning and The World Marches On" crowd. Leaving such fans behind is a major mistake. But it is a significantly greater mistake to pretend that that minority is even the primary audience, and a truly catastrophic one to pretend that it is the only one.

 

[dave2008]

I even covered that in the section you quoted.

Interruptions with wandering/random encounters or whatever that are effective enough to put the hurt on PCs? There you go, the GM just proved to the players who was certain it was an unjustified nerf that it was done to brutalize/kill their PCs.

Monsters packup their dungeon & move? There you go... the nerf was so that adversarial G M could cheat them out of a win & any lost loot.

Bad things happen in the world because the players took a week off? There you go, that adversarial GM just proved to the players that the unjustified nerf was to make sure the PCs couldn't win & get blamed for a crapsack world.

When the players don't understand why it's an improvement and they refuse to adapt to what they see as an unjustified nerf you wind up with a scenario where any & all negative results from that refusal to adapt just reinforces the appearance of it being an unjust nerf. A large part of that is a result of how gritty realism is still an all or nothing explosive return of all things with almost no possibility of resting yourself into a death spiral like the gradual linear returns of past editions,

What if everyone is mature and understands the game is not adversarial. I mean, who the heck do you game with to have these issues? You just talk things out and come to an agreement on how to play the game. It is not that difficult.