Achieving Balance

[Doug McCrae]

Combat balance matters when you have a whole lot of combat.

The less combat you have, the more other forms of balance start to matter.

This is it. As an absolute minimum, D&D ought to work as a hack & slash game.

Shadowrun for example has the Face and the Decker (Or hacker now). These aren't combat roles, yet the game manages them perfectly fine.

The Decker is so problematic that the 'Decker problem' has become the term for characters who go off from the group to play their own little sub-game. At least the D&D thief doesn't do it in another dimension.

 

[Hussar]

But in general principle, it isn't that different from saying that you can't be both a super swordsman and a super bowman.

Phew, forgot about this one. Had to go back.

I disagree actually. Balancing super swordsman and super bowman is perfectly fine. You are balancing exactly the same thing - how much damage the character does in combat. Determine how much the swordsman is assumed to do over the course of a combat and balance the bowman against that number. Since we're talking damage here, the only real question is how much of an advantage is ranged combat in the system?

But, again, how much damage is Detect Magic worth? Or Appraise?

 

[ProfessorCirno]

In earlier versions of Shadowrun, I think you have a textbook case of very poor mechanical balance. When the Decker was doing his thing, everyone else at the table got to sit and watch. Depending on how long the Decking took, you could be waiting quite a while before you got to do anything.

Gaming is not a spectator sport and any mechanic to forces players to be spectators is poor design IMO.

True, but it has gotten a lot better now!

I think the issue is that combat has more and more become divided away from everything else. Not MMORPG, think more jRPG. You're walking along when suddenly CSHHHH*sound of broken window* *seizure inducing closeup and blue effect* RANDOM ENCOUNTER!

Non-combat character traits such as rogue/scout sneakiness or bard knowledge would be more useful if, I'm being quite serious here, the game were more MMORPG-esque. The rogue sneaks up to see where the enemies are so the team can ambush/avoid them. The bard sees the big enemies and knows exactly what their weaknessess are and tells the players how to fight it, or they know where in the dungeon the treasure is.

One thing I've seen people do is alternate traps between micro and macro levels. Micro levels are the ones rogues disarm, macro levels are the ones knowledge skills help you bypass. The rogue stops the floor panel from opening into a large pit of spikes. The bard knows exactly which chalice won't cause you to die horribly when you drink from it.

I think another thing to do here is to take a note from some - though admittingly very few - RPGs, and remove combat experience altogether. Crazy? I'm not done yet. Experience would come from achieving goals, and only from that. There would still be fights, no doubt, but killing wouldn't be the only way to accomplish things. Need a magic chalice to save someone's life, but it's in the den of a fierce dragon? Fighting man kills the orcs, priest turns the skeletons, bard/wizard knows exactly what chalice you need, rogue sneaks it out from under the dragon's nose.

 

[Hussar]

I think another thing to do here is to take a note from some - though admittingly very few - RPGs, and remove combat experience altogether. Crazy? I'm not done yet. Experience would come from achieving goals, and only from that. There would still be fights, no doubt, but killing wouldn't be the only way to accomplish things. Need a magic chalice to save someone's life, but it's in the den of a fierce dragon? Fighting man kills the orcs, priest turns the skeletons, bard/wizard knows exactly what chalice you need, rogue sneaks it out from under the dragon's nose.

Yeah, a lot of the indie games are going that way. Spirit of the Century has a fantastic rewards system, for example, that is pretty much completely divorced from combat (by and large). I'm currently in the middle of reading Sufficiently Advanced and it has some really groovy ideas as well.

 

[FireLance]

I think another thing to do here is to take a note from some - though admittingly very few - RPGs, and remove combat experience altogether. Crazy? I'm not done yet. Experience would come from achieving goals, and only from that. There would still be fights, no doubt, but killing wouldn't be the only way to accomplish things. Need a magic chalice to save someone's life, but it's in the den of a fierce dragon? Fighting man kills the orcs, priest turns the skeletons, bard/wizard knows exactly what chalice you need, rogue sneaks it out from under the dragon's nose.

You know, this sparked off the germ of an idea. I'm trying to think it through as I type, so apologies if this comes off as slightly incoherent.

Combat balance is fine when all the players are interested in how well their PCs contribute to the party's success in combat. However, it becomes less relevant to the players who want their PCs to contribute in other ways. This type of balance relates to spotlight balance, but it goes beyond simply ensuring that all the PCs are able to contribute. The PCs must also contribute in ways that the player wants them to. So, if the player of the bard PC wants the bard to win friends and influence people with his silver tongue, he will not find it satisfying enouigh if the bard PC pulls off a critical hit that wins the fight.

This type of balance, "player objective balance", for want of a better term is often very difficult to achieve in practice. First of all, if the players want very different things, it may be difficult to avoid the previously mentioned "Decker problem". Second, in a traditional RPG, the initial problem/challenge/situation steup is often in the hands of the DM, and he may unwittingly make certain approaches difficult or impossible if he does not realize what his players want, e.g. "the orcs hate elves and will immediately attack and fight to the death if there is an elf in the party".

 

[billd91]

This is it. As an absolute minimum, D&D ought to work as a hack & slash game.

This could always easily be done by selecting only a subset of character classes to play - the ones geared just around hacking and slashing.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think another thing to do here is to take a note from some - though admittingly very few - RPGs, and remove combat experience altogether. Crazy? I'm not done yet. Experience would come from achieving goals, and only from that. There would still be fights, no doubt, but killing wouldn't be the only way to accomplish things. Need a magic chalice to save someone's life, but it's in the den of a fierce dragon? Fighting man kills the orcs, priest turns the skeletons, bard/wizard knows exactly what chalice you need, rogue sneaks it out from under the dragon's nose.

That isn't so crazy. I have always believed that achieving player defined goals is the best method for rewarding XP. The old XP for gold was just a type of this system that rewarded the universal goal of acquiring wealth. Substituting specific objectives for gold works great.

Care has to be taken not to force players to follow a pre-determined path to earn experience though. Allowing players to choose goals with a variety of risk vs reward helps keep the reward system from becoming DM hoops the PC's must jump through.

 

[billd91]

I disagree actually. Balancing super swordsman and super bowman is perfectly fine. You are balancing exactly the same thing - how much damage the character does in combat. Determine how much the swordsman is assumed to do over the course of a combat and balance the bowman against that number. Since we're talking damage here, the only real question is how much of an advantage is ranged combat in the system?

But, again, how much damage is Detect Magic worth? Or Appraise?

It's not so easy to balance the super swordsman and super bowman unless you're really limiting the environments of the game to, for example, the dungeon or other confined places. In a wilderness-heavy game, longer ranges that will favor the bowman over the swordsman will be common. Flying opponents will probably also be more common. Ranged combat, in these settings, can be a huge advantage.

The terms of the comparison, points of damage that can be done, may be directly comparable, but that doesn't mean the balancing act is a heck of a lot easier.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

That isn't so crazy. I have always believed that achieving player defined goals is the best method for rewarding XP. The old XP for gold was just a type of this system that rewarded the universal goal of acquiring wealth. Substituting specific objectives for gold works great.

Care has to be taken not to force players to follow a pre-determined path to earn experience though. Allowing players to choose goals with a variety of risk vs reward helps keep the reward system from becoming DM hoops the PC's must jump through.

What it makes me think of is the game Vampire the Masquerade: Blododlines (Fantastic game, even if it does fall apart at the end, I strongly recommend it).

Take your first major quest: retrieve some explosives from a group of drug dealers. You could talk your way in, seduce/convince the dealer to give it to you, and leave. Or if you weren't that charismatic, talk your way in and convince him to SELL it to you. You could just run up and murder everyone. You could sneak in, go through a back door, kill the dealer, grab the explosives, and sneak out. You could sneak by the front door, turn off the main power to the house, and kill the guards as they each went to see what happened to the power.

You could even just try to ignore everything, run in, grab the explosives, and run out, hoping they didn't kill you as you did so.

And all of these gave you the same amount of experience. The goal was simply retrieving the package - how you did it was up to the player.

 

[billd91]

In earlier versions of Shadowrun, I think you have a textbook case of very poor mechanical balance. When the Decker was doing his thing, everyone else at the table got to sit and watch. Depending on how long the Decking took, you could be waiting quite a while before you got to do anything.

Gaming is not a spectator sport and any mechanic to forces players to be spectators is poor design IMO.

I'm not sure I'd really call that a mechanical balance issue. Rather, it's a conceptual issue in that characters operating in one environment really can't do much to get involved in the other environment at all. The mechanics for carrying out both sorts of character actions (combat, netrunning) may be perfect and well-balanced for all I care, but the concept of the two types of activities would still be a problem.
In some ways, this is a question of spotlight balancing in which the game's following hacker/cyberpunk genre convention enforces a bit too much separation between characters to achieve equal time in the spotlight.

You have similar problems in other games where a player may be trying to play a coordinator or mentor character like Professor X to the rest of the X-men. His limited mobility and remote location make him completely impractical as a PC next with Beast, Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl, and Cyclops in the field.