Achieving Balance

[Dausuul]

Balance, or rather the common conception of balance on internet forums, is a fad.

Soon people will find some other aspect of RPGs to fetishize.

This fad has been going on for as long as I've been playing RPGs, and I've been playing RPGs since the late 1980s.

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.

Right. So, at my gaming table, how much combat is there? You have no idea, and neither do the designers. Hence, it's important to have combat be internally balanced, so that my table can have lots of combat and your table can have hardly any, and neither of us suffers balance issues.

Same applies to other areas of the game, like social encounters and exploration.

I think another thing to do here is to take a note from some - though admittingly very few - RPGs, and remove combat experience altogether.

"Very few?" Um... how many RPGs have you played? At least in my experience, it would be more accurate to say "virtually all." In the tabletop realm, the XP-for-kills mechanic is an oddity specific to D&D and its immediate descendants. (CRPGs are another matter, of course.)

 

[Remathilis]

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.

The "decker problem" is (as you pointed out) not limited to Shadowrun. D&D thieves were for a long-time built around the premise of "cool things to do, but you suck at combat" balance. The problem was it created a polarization; the thief had to be good at his "jobs" so by extention everyone else* had to suck at it. To balance this, they had to be slightly better than magic-users in combat ability so as not to dominate the game (if you can imagine that).

(* by everyone else, I mean of course non-spellcasters. Spellcasters could continue to dominate if they prepared the right spells. Note this also ignored magical items that surpasses thief ability, like elven cloaks or chimes of opening)

One of the generally good things 4e did with the "homoginization" of classes is made all classes a bit more "skilled" and made rogues a bit more combat-focused. It meant a rogue didn't have stand around while his friends owned in combat, and it meant the rogue didn't scout up alone while his friends sat around waiting for him to scout the next 30 ft of hallway. Sure, a fighter is a better combatant than a rogue, and a rogue is still the best skill-user in the game, but the all-or-nothing system is replaced by a more gradiant system.

 

[Ariosto]

... I am incredulous ...

Yeah, when I mentioned it in another thread, someone started in with, "Even at the blinding speed of 30 seconds per round per figure ..." (or some such, not verbatim). If I had never actually played 3E/4E, trying to imagine that would have blown my mind!

There's been a "boiling frog" phenomenon, as not only does the change come in increments from version to version, but fewer and fewer people remain who remember how things used to be several versions ago. "So it is, and so it ever has been" is how things may seem.

The flip side is that what was old is new again. "Old school" approaches hit like radical revolutions, really turning on some of those who meet them for the first time today (and also turning off some, just as they did in yesteryear).

The (or a) bottom line is that actual experience of play is sometimes revelatory. That's how I was introduced to D&D, not by reading about it.

 

[Ariosto]

The problem was it created a polarization; the thief had to be good at his "jobs" so by extention everyone else* had to suck at it.

One problem with this "niche protection" rule -- which was a "house" rule, not "official" until WotC versions -- was that, reduced to total dependence on the thief-function probabilities, the thief "sucked" pretty badly !

 

[Raven Crowking]

I might have been unclear: I know what editions were meant, but I am incredulous of the implication that prior editions were different in that regard.

If you care to jump back to when 4e was announced, you will discover quite a bit of talk about how slow 3e is combat-wise. One of the initially intended goals of 4e was to speed up combat.

Should you care to examine the threads following the initial release of 4e, you will discover significant space devoted to combatting combat "grind" and speeding up combat in general. You may also note that WotC decided to make combats last long enough to allow everyone to do 'something cool"; i.e., the longer combats are an intentional design element.

I began to run a Basic Fantasy game, and combats were much faster than the norm I experienced with 3e, even with the same players. When I began playtesting RCFG (where the combat rules are much more complex than those of Basic Fantasy, but much less complex than 3e), I was able to keep a ratio of encounters per session similar to Basic Fantasy.

This was done simply by elminating the need for a grid.

Scott Rouse, in another thread (and I can and will hunt it down for you if need be) admitted that WotC-D&D is more tied into minis than TSR-D&D, and that 4e is more tied to minis than 3e. This is an obvious move for WotC, as their market research showed that players who buy minis spend significantly more than those who do not.

Some time back I ran the Caves of Chaos (from Keep on the Borderland) in 3e, and the pace was significantly slower than running the same module in 1e, 2e, or Holmes Basic (all of which I have also done).

"Faster playing" doesn't necessarily mean "better" or "more fun", but it does have a real effect on how balance (or lack there of) interacts with the game. If, running 3e, I average 1 encounter per 40 minutes, and in RCFG I average 5 encounters during the same period, the 1 encounter in 3e must bear five times the "weight" (in terms of "table balance" and "fun") that any one of the 5 RCFG encounters must bear.

IOW, if any one of the five RCFG encounters is a dog, the 40 minutes can still be fun overall, but if the single 3e encounter is a dog, then the 40 minutes sucks.

This is going to greatly affect how the players view balance in the game. I cannot see how it can be avoided.



RC

 

[Ariosto]

With 4E combat scenarios, I think it's especially essential to pack in a lot of variety -- not just from encounter to encounter, but within each. That one situation, after all, is taking the place (literally time) of what could otherwise be a whole series of events and decisions advancing the "story" significantly. Basically, each one needs to be more like something one might formerly have expected to be the highlight of a whole session.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

"Very few?" Um... how many RPGs have you played? At least in my experience, it would be more accurate to say "virtually all." In the tabletop realm, the XP-for-kills mechanic is an oddity specific to D&D and its immediate descendants. (CRPGs are another matter, of course.)

Yeah, sorry for any misunderstandings, I was refering to cRPGs.

 

[Leatherhead]

What if the plumbers want to form a union?
What if the plumber's union is just a front for the mob?
What if the plumber's union is trying to get an important plumber-based law passed?
What if an assassin after the mayor disguised him/her self as a plumber?
What if the mayor needs the plumbers' union endorsement?
What if the bathroom breaks during a major polictial convention?
What if the city is doing a major sewage project?
What if all the plumbers go on strike?
What about Joe the Plumber?

Out of the nine scenarios you listed, exactly two of them require both of the peoples specialties. The rest have one (or potently both) of them out of their primary element. Most of them are simply the politician interacting with someone who happens to be a plumber, in a way that only superficiality relates to them being a plumber.

Of course, this is exactly what I was talking about. How many drains do you need unclogged while simultaneously negotiating red tape? Obviously they are few and far between. My point is that you can't mechanically balance characters who don't have a significant common ground. There is just no basis for comparing the two of them; they do different tasks, overcome different problems, and have different goals or definitions of success. The characters, and even their players perhaps, would be better served with two different campaigns or games.

 

[Ariosto]

Super Mario Brothers

Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper

 

[Hussar]

I might have been unclear: I know what editions were meant, but I am incredulous of the implication that prior editions were different in that regard.

I might take the piss out of earlier editions, but, that's one I won't touch. They most certainly did cycle through combat faster. Really, there's no way they couldn't to be honest. When your options are so limited, how much time can your spend? Fighter - roll 1-3 attacks per round, roll damage. No feats, very few buffing spells, and very few situational modifiers- and the ones there actually were, like AC vs weapons, lots of people didn't bother with anyway.

If you spent more than half an hour dealing a combat in 1e or Basic/Expert, that was a long fight.

Well, that's maybe a bit of an exaggeration. In my group, we probably spent 20 minutes playing and 40 minutes fighting about the rules, bitching about bad die rolls and various other things. But, that's neither here nor there.