NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9481429" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Is that "true" balance?Or is it bad, lame, trivial balance?Because I have always argued that it is the latter and not the former.Asymmetrical design can still be balanced, so long as "balance" is not interpreted to mean absolute perfection, but rather that the game design has been well-tested for achieving the goals the designers set. It's just significantly harder to balance asymmetrically, and requires more designer work.I think the exaggeration here severely weakens your point, rather than enhancing it. You make players sound like petulant children who want nothing to ever go wrong, and I find that that is quite far from the truth. Instead, players want to feel like they have earned their victories, with two stipulations. First, they want it so that, as long as they were pursuing an actually reasonable end and genuinely putting in effort and skill and forethought, victory really was at least reasonably possible (so, no "oh sure you can win....if you roll two nat 20s in a row" type stuff). And second, they want it so that if they lost, it wasn't purely because of fickle whims of dice, though dice can play a non-determinative part; instead, if they failed to achieve their goals, they want it to be because they played badly and legitimately made unwise or self-inhibiting decisions (which may be fully intentional, depending on RP.)You're correct that players want to win most fights, but it's a mistake to view "game balance" as being about giving two opponents equal chances of success. Game balance means that the design goals actually do succeed most of the time, up to reasonable limits given we're talking about randomness and the frequently-harebrained schemes of TTRPG players. A well-balanced game will generally have the players win (much) more often than they lose, because actually losing at anything like a symmetric rate is deeply demoralizing and un-fun to most people. A minority will most certainly be galvanized instead, but it's a small minority.Good, effective game design--which is what a game being "balanced" means--results in most players usually having the intended experience even across a wide range of different inputs (player preferences, party compositions, threat levels, etc.) This is not some pie-in-the-sky pipe dream, nor is it something that axiomatically results in dull, flavorless crap. Obviously, doing this well requires work. That's literally what we pay game designers for.</blockquote>

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