Balanced Game System: Imperative or Bugaboo

[Dausuul]

Balance is not an issue I've ever heard complained by players in game, nor at an LGS. The debate only seems to occur online in forums in my experience. Not to say it doesn't exist, but I've never heard a live person even mention it. But then there are many RPG issues discussed on forums, that I've also never seen in actual play... like the 15 minute adventure day, the over-powered-ness of wizards in low to mid level games, etc. Almost as if they are online urban legends, and not real concerns in gaming.

I have experienced balance issues in actual play. Sometimes they were due to deliberate powergaming, but many were accidental; somebody just happened to pick a build that was grossly over- or underpowered.

I remember one 3.5E campaign where I made a druid with a tiger animal companion. My previous experience of characters with "pets" (mostly arcane casters with familiars) had led me to believe the pets tended to be on the weak side in combat, so I took a few feats and spells to beef up mine. That tiger dominated the battlefield. On at least one occasion I forgot to declare my own action because it was so inconsequential compared to the tiger's pounce-and-rake routine. I soon retired that character because nobody else was getting any glory.

Then there was the night I ran a one-shot BECMI game at 9th level*. To all appearances, the party consisted of one magic-user and some speed bumps to slow down the monsters on their way to said magic-user. Ridiculously lopsided.

On the underpowered side... monks, mostly. The 3.X monk is a trap just waiting to snap its jaws on newbie players; it looks so cool and awesome with all its special abilities, and then you play one and discover that none of those special abilities is actually worth anything. Melee types in high-level 3.X games are another example. The underpowered PCs have been less memorable but considerably more numerous than the overpowered ones.

[SIZE=-2]*Well, 8th to 10th. I handed out a fixed amount of XP, so levels varied by class.[/SIZE]

 

[Bedrockgames]

There are some really good monk builds in 3e as I recall.

 

[Umbran]

Balance is not an issue I've ever heard complained by players in game, nor at an LGS. The debate only seems to occur online in forums in my experience.

Well, there's a possible explanation for part of that. Usually, when folks complain about a game, they're complaining about a single game - usually a single session or campaign. They're thinking very locally.

If you had balance problem in a game, for example, it might look like one guy had taken a specific combination of classes/spells/feats that made his character so effective that he ran roughshod over the group. That one incident is just one incident, one loophole. Folks will tend to think of it in terms of the specific issue they faced.

Here, on EN World, we often frame out discussions about generalities and trends, rather than individual incidents.

 

[Dausuul]

There are some really good monk builds in 3e as I recall.

"Good" relative to what? I mean, you can design a monk character and optimize it within an inch of its life, with feats and options from half a dozen splatbooks, and it'll outperform most standard-issue noncaster PCs. But that's a testament to the power of optimization in 3.X, not the power of monks. The question is what happens when you stack that character up against a similarly optimized barbarian, fighter, or rogue... or against a bog-standard spellcaster played by someone who knows what she's doing.

 

[gamerprinter]

I have experienced balance issues in actual play. Sometimes they were due to deliberate powergaming, but many were accidental; somebody just happened to pick a build that was grossly over- or underpowered.

I remember one 3.5E campaign where I made a druid with a tiger animal companion. My previous experience of characters with "pets" (mostly arcane casters with familiars) had led me to believe the pets tended to be on the weak side in combat, so I took a few feats and spells to beef up mine. That tiger dominated the battlefield. On at least one occasion I forgot to declare my own action because it was so inconsequential compared to the tiger's pounce-and-rake routine. I soon retired that character because nobody else was getting any glory.

Then there was the night I ran a one-shot BECMI game at 9th level*. To all appearances, the party consisted of one magic-user and some speed bumps to slow down the monsters on their way to said magic-user. Ridiculously lopsided.

On the underpowered side... monks, mostly. The 3.X monk is a trap just waiting to snap its jaws on newbie players; it looks so cool and awesome with all its special abilities, and then you play one and discover that none of those special abilities is actually worth anything. Melee types in high-level 3.X games are another example. The underpowered PCs have been less memorable but considerably more numerous than the overpowered ones.

[SIZE=-2]*Well, 8th to 10th. I handed out a fixed amount of XP, so levels varied by class.[/SIZE]

Again, not saying it doesn't happen or can't happen - it's just that I have never seen such in incident in 33 years of gaming. Perhap's we're lucky, no power gamers here, or circumstance have glossed over when it may have happened, but nobody noticed.

As an aside, my last purely 3x character was a straight class monk which I played to epic levels. While I don't care for epic gaming, it was OK. And the experience didn't seem mitigated by the fact that I was a monk. I was definitely inequal to the bruisers and wizards, but I was not overly diminished because of my class choice. I did plenty of things they could not. My good saves and fast movement allowed me to defeat a powerful outsider that kept trying to Dismiss me, after having dismissed all the other party members - I just kept making my save. Then I would Spring Attack/Roblar's Gambit - punch him a couple times and never get hit.

While it's probably a corner case, encounters like that made me glad I was monk and not another class choice...

 

[Bedrockgames]

"Good" relative to what? I mean, you can design a monk character and optimize it within an inch of its life, with feats and options from half a dozen splatbooks, and it'll outperform most standard-issue noncaster PCs. But that's a testament to the power of optimization in 3.X, not the power of monks. The question is what happens when you stack that character up against a similarly optimized barbarian, fighter, or rogue... or against a bog-standard spellcaster played by someone who knows what she's doing.

Good relative to other builds. I ran a game full of optimizers and guy in the group made some uber builds using the monk as a base. Some of the best builds I saw were noncaster oriented (generally very specialized builds capable of insane amounts of damage with the right circumstances). Druids were also a common one but they are easy to nerf as a GM (i found this with spellcasters in general). Clerics with buff spells also cropped up, but their big weakness was they tended to spend the first three rounds of combat buffing themselves (which was easy to capitalize on).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Some balance issues are indirect, and thus difficult to notice at first. And not infrequently, those issues have symptoms that you might address well enough some other way.

For example, I had a 3E campaign with 9 characters. The wizard took a couple of levels of monk, which kept the worst of the overpowered spells out of the campaign until the very end. The cleric took a prestige class and spent a lot of time buffing other people. The lady playing the druid couldn't make some sessions, and spent the whole campaign 2-4 levels behind everyone else. (Later, we changed it to no more than 2, because more than that was intolerable. But 2 behind was still pretty effective.)

None of that was done for balance. It just worked out that way. So the mainly fighter (about 1/3 rogue levels) and mainly rogue (about 1/3 fighter levels) were reasonably effective by comparison, even in the higher levels. What they didn't have was any room to branch out like the other characters, into prestige classes or other stuff. This they didn't like. The complaint was, "we don't get to expand our scope enough." Heck, decding to have both of them multiclass on those ratios was the only thing that kept it tolerable. Part of that was the type of players, and part was the shock of playing 3E after Fantasy Hero, but mainly they saw everyone else getting a wider range of things to do and felt left out. They had to stay narrow to keep up.

It was thus ultimately a balance issue, though a subtle one. Had the player of the druid (two thirds of the sessions) gone with fighter/rogue and the player of the fighter/rogue (every single session) gone with the druid, it would have gotten out of hand in a hurry.

 

[Mark CMG]

This poll is breaking down about as I had expected it to go. I think there is much to be said for designing with balance but not having the game focus too much on it from moment to moment: Balance without being aware of the scaffolding, so to speak. I think that games that focus on the RPing aspects, where the mechanics flow from the narrative aspects of the game, can be more difficult to design but produce a more satisfying RPing experience, yet still require strong underpinnings of balance.

 

[Bullgrit]

Balance in game mechanics is like editing in publications. If it's done well, no one will notice it. If it is done poorly, everyone will notice it, and it can be a problem.

Bullgrit

 

[steeldragons]

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

True.

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

This is also true. Probably younger to start...but sure, 15 is a good average.

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

All true. Good point(s).
--SD