Balanced Game System: Imperative or Bugaboo

[Bedrockgames]

Just because one doesn't notice something or personally care about it, that doesn't mean it didn't exist or that others didn't care about it. Gygax and others talked about game balance (written rules and DM rulings) many times during the AD&D years. He even talked about balance in AD&D in recent years on this forum:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...d-d1-designed-game-balance-5.html#post5024751

But we were young, (what? 15 years old? Younger?), and didn't care about game design theory.

I'd bet dollars to donuts, that if you ask a 15 year old new D&D player today about game balance, they don't notice or think about it any more than we did 30 years ago. It's not something that just recently came into being; it's something that we just recently came to think about.

Bullgrit

Not only did it come up in the 80s and 90s (I started gaming in about 86), we were having pretty much the same argument about it as I recall. Back then people argued about whether balancing a wizard over the length of his entire career was a good or bad idea (weak to start, but powerful in the end), as they do today. I remember balance debates coming up all the time. As long as someone at the table could say "this sucks" because they felt outshined you would have these discussions. The only difference is the discussions were mostly real table conversations, you didn't have this massive online medium for arguing about the game with total strangers.

 

[Umbran]

And if he deliberately made some options stronger than others (rather than trying to give them all niches) then he did include traps in the game.

But, as stated, that's not what happened. He included options that were stronger or weaker depending upon the style and situation of play.

Real masters of the rules recognize that play in, say, a convention one-shot and play in a long-running campaign are not the same thing. Different choices will be optimal in those different situations. Toughness and Item Creation feats come to mind as example - Toughness actually has a good use in the low-level one-shot game. Item creation feats, on the other hand, are a pretty lousy choice for a one-shot, but come to the fore in long-running campaign play.

So, there are no intentional traps - just a larger scope of possible play than many people expect.

 

[Umbran]

In my personal gaming experience, in no group I ever played with, through all of the 80s and into the early 90s, did a discussion or argument about "balance" ever come up.

My wife likes to bake. Normally, the eggs used to bake that cake do not come up in discussion. That doesn't make them unimportant to the quality of the cake, though. The cake will suck without eggs, even if we don't realize that and talk about them.

The eggs only get discussed when speaking with folks who are interested in and knowledgeable of the chemistry of baking. It's kind of a specialist topic.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

In 1981, my house school group had about 7 regulars, and about that many again occasionals. None of the occasionals cared one whit for balance (or a bunch of other things). Out of the regulars, 4 were happy as long as things went reasonably well, 1 was a bit interested in balance discussion as it pertained to the characters playing at the time--while I and another guy talked about balance a lot (along with the rest of our gaming interests).

We weren't very informed or insightful on the discussion. That's how we ended up with a homebrew system that the more interested of us kludged together, where in the first playtest, a Jedi-rabbit was running amuck over the other players, until he got punched into a frictionless clockwork trap room. But we were interested.

 

[Hussar]

I think you make an interesting argument Hussar but why must a game be balanced so every option is equally viable in order to work. There are different ways to approach balance. While I think balance is important, i still argue it needs to be weighed against plausibility and flavor. I want balance but I also want some level of realism and for my decisions to matter.

"Equally viable" is a really hard metric to live up to. And, in a game as complex as D&D, it's likely never going to be something you can actually achieve.

However, as Crazy Jerome rightly points out, you can cut off the outliers and achieve something that's more balanced.

I think "more balanced" is probably the metric designers should strive for rather than some sort of ideal of "balance".

Option A might be better for person A and Option B might be better for Person B, and those two options are at least in the same ballpark and I'm pretty happy.

 

[Hussar]

Not only did it come up in the 80s and 90s (I started gaming in about 86), we were having pretty much the same argument about it as I recall. Back then people argued about whether balancing a wizard over the length of his entire career was a good or bad idea (weak to start, but powerful in the end), as they do today. I remember balance debates coming up all the time. As long as someone at the table could say "this sucks" because they felt outshined you would have these discussions. The only difference is the discussions were mostly real table conversations, you didn't have this massive online medium for arguing about the game with total strangers.

Yeah, this mirrors my experience as well. I'm a bit of an odd duck, I think, because I changed groups so often through the 80's and the 90's. It wasn't until the oughts that I managed to get a stable group, so I think this colors a lot of my perceptions.

See, this is why I dislike unbalanced systems. It makes changing groups SO difficult. Every time you get a new player or a new DM, you get to learn a new interpretation of the system. And that interpretation could vary very wildly. I saw all sorts of wonky weirdness over the years.

A solid base of balance gives everyone the same starting point to work from. Granted, as I said above, you're never going to get perfect balance, and, honestly, that's not even something you want I think. But, when options in the game are roughly in keeping with each other, Crazy Jerome's 80:20 rule of thumb, then everyone is happy.

Once you have that level of balance, whether you achieve it out of the box, or through hashing out balance issues of the system for your group, then you can start deviating from that baseline much more easily.

The other side of balance is transparency. Honestly, I think that's probably the best way to achieve balance in the game. Even if the rules are horribly broken, if the rule is transparent, then it becomes very easy to fix, or not, depending on what you want. It's when unbalanced rules are buried under tons of verbiage that it becomes difficult to make changes.

 

[Glade Riven]

The argument about balance is more about how to balance equality with options. The more options, the harder to maintain equality. And folk want different things out of the experiance.

Still, beyond videogames my experiance is with D20 variants. 3e and 3.5 had trouble, but more or less worked with an adaptive DM. Star Wars Saga had some major balance issues (mostly problems of scale - starships can do that). Pathfinder successfully improves on 3.5, although there are still a few issues at higher levels (although folk still complain about the monk, because they don't understand the point of the class). 4e became too formulaic early on. Right now I've settled on Pathfinder as my system of choice - I find it offers the right blend of what I like. 5e may surplant it, especially if 4e is to Windows Vista as 5e is to Windows 7.

No matter what system, a power builder will find a way to exploit it. A good DM/GM will not only account for that, but use it against them .

 

[Hussar]

I think Transbot9 makes a good point. Regardless of how balanced you make a game system, people will find ways to exploit any sufficiently complex set of rules. But, again, I'm not sure if this is a good argument against trying to balance the system in the first place. Sure, I can break the system, but, I would rather that the designers don't let me break it by accident.

A good example of this was Old WoD. You could create fantastically powerful characters mostly by accident. Put five pips in wealth and suddenly you have resources to deal with so many problems that is becomes difficult for the storyteller to create scenarios.

That sort of thing should be recognized in the design phase of the game and nipped in the bud long before the game sees the shelves.

 

[Glade Riven]

Really, the best approach is probably a shotgun approach so that there is a little bit of everything for everyone, then try to find major game-breaking elements and correct them.

Despite my bashing on Star Wars Saga above, the system was fairly solid except for starships - which were decent vs. starships, but could cause problems with them being far more powerful than any individual character could be. Had a near party-wipe due to friendly fire since someone at the time decided to bring a starfighter to a blaster fight. Had to deus ex my way out of that one...

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Really, the best approach is probably a shotgun approach so that there is a little bit of everything for everyone, then try to find major game-breaking elements and correct them.

Yes. Macro balance is often important. Micro balance often isn't, and the means to attempt it cause more trouble than they solve.

I look at this a bit like software quality assurance and user interface design. If you've got a "problem" that keeps coming up for most of your users, and really getting in the way of their work--then you need to fix it. But you need to really fix it right, even if that means digging into the core of the design and getting at the core problem. But if you've got something like a few people complaining about the arrangement of a few buttons and text boxes, it isn't worth the time to even evaluate a change, much less do it. And if a bunch of users start complaining about the arrangment, there is a good chance the problem is not, "change X to Y" but "change X to be more flexible so that each user can set it however they want." And thus you are back to macro changes. (And this isn't about the amount of work required to fix it. It may take five minutes to make the correct macro change, once you've properly evaluated the problem. And people may waste days and weeks on cosmetic, largely useless trivia.)

In both 3E and 4E, WotC has gotten into the habit of making micro changes--trying to tweak balance to satisfy the latest complaints from the char ops types. This never works. And when char ops comes to a consensus on a real problem (math issue), then micro changes don't solve it well. The zillion trivial changes to spells in 3.5 are another example.

Or put another way, "issues" are either symptoms of important problems that need to be addressed, or they aren't worth fooling with. When you start making micro changes, you hide the symptoms, and thus make it harder to deal with the core problem.