Balance Meter - allowing flavorful imbalance in a balanced game

[Crazy Jerome]

[MENTION=82160]hanez[/MENTION], the more the designers take the math seriously, the less the rest of us will need to.

 

[hanez]

....
For that discussion to have any meaning, however, there has to be a roughly balanced baseline from which to measure. In fact, you can more readily diverge from that baseline knowing it is there. As long as you aren't forced into balance or imbalance.

That all sounds great. In my play its usual casual conversation with the DM. And players are always free to switch anyways once they get the feel of a game. Often what I do is the player says "I may wanna play a barbarian" and I say cool, well if you want, tell me and well make sure your bard dies a glorious death. Then we figure out some railroad to let him die but save a princess or soemthing and all of a sudden hes the town hero, a martyr. And then a new character lets call him conan walks into town, and guess what hes the same level as you guys. I know its cliche, but fun all the same.

I would argue for 50% combat, 25 percent exploration, and 25% social usually works well in my games. The social is the stuff that makes the combat memorable in my experience.

As to the math, CrazyJerome, I see your point. But it seems to me in one recent edition they took the math VERY seriously, and I know my group couldnt get away from it no matter how hard we tried. And Im definitely not alone, looking at Pathfinder, its not all grognards, its also full of players that like a different style of game that was pretty much abandoned. Still I think we agree on most of the issues.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As to the math, CrazyJerome, I see your point. But it seems to me in one recent edition they took the math VERY seriously, and I know my group couldnt get away from it no matter how hard we tried. And Im definitely not alone, looking at Pathfinder, its not all grognards, its also full of players that like a different style of game that was pretty much abandoned. Still I think we agree on most of the issues.

Well, if you went to build your dream house, would you want every room the same size? Probably not. But if you came from some crazed culture that decided the way to have different sized rooms was to a kitchen ruler, a living room ruler, a bath ruler, and so forth--with different actual lengths per inch or centimeter. Or rather, just "rods" of certain lengths with no subordinate markings that are consistent. And while the baths were smaller than kitchen, all the baths were more or less the same. You might get a rebellion. You might get some people that were so rebellious that they really focused on having a unified ruler at the expense of keeping that bath small. Meanwhile, things as "insignificant" as closets got cut out entirely.

Then some time later, when you wanted to improve this further, some of the people that liked their baths the way they used to be (even though, "used to be" had changed over time, too, and this meant different things to different people), said that the way to get what they want is to go back to ad hoc and inconsistent measurements.

Me, having lived through all of that annoyance, would like to keep the more consistent ruler but start using it for a wider variety of things. I like for the things I make to be the length I want them to be. I like for the inches on the tape to be consistent. When the guy that makes the tape can get me that, I'll quite worrying about it.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Huh? I have to ask my DM? If I have to do that why not just put it in the rules? Isn't that what we always hear, just because a DM can fix it doesnt mean its not broke.

Having to be good at combat makes the system broken? Just don't use those powers ever if you really want to be bad at combat...Not sure why that makes it broken.

You can have as many rituals as you can afford to put into your Ritual book. The DM can give you as many of these to start with as he wants to, just like spells in previous editions. And you start with a couple by default. Just like spells from previous editions.

And by the way Im not usually a player I usually DM. And I DM in a system where players can choose a variety of types of chaacters, where players can focus on the area of their choice (and its usually combat). I am just arguing for a system that lets THEM CHOOSE. That system was always D&D, right now its pathfinder/arcana evolved, but Im rooting for D&D.

Choice is bad for balance. You want to give SOME choice...but too much and you end up with a character doing 15d6 damage to 10 enemies in the same group with the one doing 1d6 damage to one enemy. You end up with the guy who has +45 in a skill in the same group as the one who has -1. You end up with the guy who can control the minds of 30 people for a month straight in the same group as the guy who ask nicely for favors(with the -1 in his diplomacy skill).

It's good to have choice and a bit of variation to differentiate different classes and different archetypes...but that variation needs to be within a fairly narrow range to avoid situations where one character is exponentially better than another.

This is especially true when new players come along. They might look at the list of feats and say "I want to be good at craft(pottery), since I used to do that for a living. Also, I want to be good at dancing, because that's a hobby of mine, I'll take skill focus in both of them." Then, it isn't until later that they find out that all characters do 1d6 damage unless they take the feat that increases that do 10d6, and they all have no bonuses to hit unless they take the feat that gives them +10 to hit.

Then they find out that the game is mostly combat based and they spend most of the combats reading through a book and waiting for their turn to attack, knowing they are going to miss anyways.

I'd prefer a system that lets you choose. But makes sure you have a minimum skill that is at least useful in every category, even if you don't choose it.

 

[BobTheNob]

...Choice is bad for balance...

"Balance is bad for choice"?

Interesting

 

[TwinBahamut]

"Balance is bad for choice"?

Interesting

Logical fallacy. A -> B does not mean B -> A.

 

[keterys]

I might lean towards Gamers trying to break the game being bad for choice _and_ balance.

Like the idea of fairly freeform magic in Saga sounded great, until I asked if I could cast a spell to buff the casting stat of the other caster... and I could... and he then cast an even more awesome spell to buff my casting stat... and suddenly I could solve any problem at all, by waving my hand. (All, sadly, as a collateral result of us trying to figure out how we could possibly hit dragons, due to a statistical imbalance in the game)

Too much choice can be bad for the game, by making it unplayable (too strong and too weak) for too many people. There's a real balance act there.

Too much choice can also be bad for people in terms of decision paralysis and rules exhaustion when leveling occurs. I... game way too much, several times a week, I memorize entire rules books, have made thousands of game elements (feats, items, monsters, etc)... and this hit me when I was playing D&D Online. I leveled to a certain point and realized I needed to decide on what class level to take. And when pondering that I suddenly realized that, in true 3e fashion, that effectively meant I needed to decide _everything_ about my character. So I started reading all of the various build options, requirements for PrCs, feats, whatever their fiddly little benefit thingies were, etc... and then I never logged in again, cause I couldn't be bothered to care enough.

At the other end of the scale, I know 3-4 people who just have 1-2 other people make characters for them, because they don't want to figure out all of those fiddly choices. They just want to play. Based on 5e's stated goals, this could work perfectly for them - the ones who want complexity get it, the ones who don't can dodge it...

But that doesn't really work if the guy with the complexity is 2 or more times as effective. No matter how awful they were for a couple sessions at the start of the campaign before they leveled into their awesomeness. And XP penalties certainly wouldn't solve that, at any end of the scale.

 

[BobTheNob]

Logical fallacy. A -> B does not mean B -> A.

True, but I wouldnt have posted if the statement wasnt consistant with my observation of 4e. Yes, There were SO many classes, but the balance obsession made them all same same (took 2 years of playing to realise that)

I stand by my post.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

"Balance is bad for choice"?

Interesting

It is....They are a spectrum. You need to find a point on the spectrum that fits the best. Allowing too much choice will destroy balance. Too much balance will give you no choices at all. The problem is, most people don't see this and are advocating absolute freedom of choice. Which is absolute lack of balance.

The Hero/Champions system is excellent. I love it for the days I like to play with numbers and sit around for 4 or 5 hours coming up with a character concept and building it to exact specifications. It allows you to build ANYTHING. However, I can tell you from experience running it that if you follow the default options in the book and just say "You have 350 points, build a character", there will be next to 0 balance in the group.

In fact, it's likely half of the characters will die in the FIRST ATTACK in the game. As a bunch of them had character concepts like "The guy who can fly and was a scientist". Build that character and put him up against Superman, and I can tell you that one punch splatters him.

So, the process we normally go through when we introduce new players to Champions for the first time is:

-Explain the system to them, it takes a couple of hours to explain the math to them and how to work with a system that allows them to build ANYTHING.

-Make up a character. It is normally completely broken and done wrong.

-I give them baselines for damage and defenses, maximum points they can spend in 1 power, maximums they can put in defenses and attacks, and minimums they should put in defenses and attacks. They remake their characters with these new restrictions.

-I examine the characters, find as many mistakes as I can and show them how to fix them. They rebuild their character. I miss a bunch of mistakes because the system is complicated enough that unless you have a LOT of experience with it(which I don't), you miss stuff.

-Play through a test battle with the characters, half of them will still die as they picked the minimums...which I set so that someone could have ONE weakness(That would likely be covered up by an advantage that negated the weakness), but they wanted to be a role playing character, so they picked the minimums for everything combat related.

-Let them modify their characters for a while to make up for any mistakes they may have made and try again. Possibly modifying a 2nd time after that(and possibly 3rd).

This process tends to take about 6-12 hours, happens over a week or 2 and involves a couple of sessions of getting together. Even after this process, if I make a mistake creating one of the enemies that they fight, I could wipe out the entire group accidentally because balance is so difficult to get right and there are so many factors because of the huge amount of choice you have.

Champions is a system that is a headache to DM and that I have to continually balance myself. I don't want D&D to become that as well(and it did somewhere around late 3.5e).

I'd like the D&D experience to be much, much, much easier on the DM. I want the process to be "Make up 4th level characters, we'll play for the first time on Friday". As soon as we have to start discussing whether the game will be 20% social and 80% combat or 60% social and 40% combat and how many of your choices should be in which areas....it becomes a headache.

Especially because I don't know when I start an adventure what the percentages will be. I'm just going to run an adventure. I'd like the characters to be able to handle all situations I throw at them.

Edit: That means "forcing" players to have options in all areas of the game that are useful, whether they want them or not. It also means denying players options that would allow them to OVER focus in one area.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Too much choice can be bad for the game, by making it unplayable (too strong and too weak) for too many people. There's a real balance act there.

Too much choice can also be bad for people in terms of decision paralysis and rules exhaustion when leveling occurs...

Yes. I think the latter is part of that balancing act, and directly related to those diminishing returns I mentioned earlier. Piggybacking off your post futher ...

We all know this, even the people that say it isn't true. You can eventually come up with a setup so extreme that everyone agrees it is imbalanced. A wizard apprentice wields cosmic power and can instantly slay any non-wizard if he wins initiative. A wizard gets one spell all his life, roughly equal to a cantrip.

Moreover, the only choices that really matter are the ones that are meaningful. Meaning can vary, of course. So you want your bard to play the lute instead of the pipes? That's fine, but it's probably color. It may very well be the height of importance to your bard (and by extension, you), because he got that lute from his aged master before orcs in the employ of the main campaign bad guys killed him in cold blood. So that's story importance, and might matter later in the story, but mechanically it is meaningless.

One of the key ways to get useful mechanical balance without wasting everyones' time and confusing them is to stop pretending that mere color is a meaningful mechanical choice. Or alternately, if you want some particular thing that usually is mere color to be mechanically meaningful, lobby for it be so. That is, it is coherent to argue that "craft - basket" is mere color. It is coherent to argue that you want it to be more meaningful than that, and provide some suggestions how it might be. It's not coherent to say, "Just stick it on a list with a bunch of other things that bear no relation to it at all, and someone will make it come out ok in the end."