D&D General Do you care how about "PC balance"?

[Doug McCrae]

So, do you, as a player, actually worry about how your character stacks up to other players' characters?

This doesn't go far enough. I want all the PCs to be balanced with one another whether I have a powerful PC, an average PC, a weak PC, or I'm the GM. For me it's part of what makes a good rpg, perhaps the most important part.

If I have a character that I think is too powerful relative to the other PCs then I'll feel uncomfortable and probably weaken them. I did this in a game of Big Eyes, Small Mouth where I removed my PC's force field.

If so, in what ways?

Each PC needs to be making a roughly equal contribution to the success of the mission. It's okay for one PC to be better at X if another PC is better at Y. I look at the whole range of PC abilities rpgs are typically interested in such as incapacitating enemies, survivability, healing, stealth, information gathering, influencing NPCs, resistance to external control, and movement. Basically changing the game world in ways the player wants, and resisting change that the player doesn't want.

I'm used to fairly high powered games such as superhero where the players can build their own PCs. In such games relative power can be much more of an issue than it is in, say, low level D&D.

Spotlight time is also important. It's connected to PC capability but there isn't a 1-to-1 relationship.

 

[Sacrosanct]

In almost 40 years of gaming, only one time did I ever play a game where the imbalance was so severe that I felt the game sucked and was unplayable.

It was the first time I played RIFTS. I created a "regular" character which seemed pretty typical. SDC weapons and gear, worked with the DM who seemed fine and didn't give me any hint of what was gonna happen.

All the other experienced players started with PCs like Glitter Boys, with heavy hitting MDC weapons.

It was not fun.

But D&D? Never really felt like the balance was bad enough to ruin the game or give me a bad experience

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So yes, of course, I have encountered people that weren't entirely happy with how their character was performing, and sometimes the seed for that discontent was other characters' performance. But no, I have never seen a real player at the table build a character because they need to outperform the wizard, or whatever.

That's my point, that's a vastly narrower definition than "caring about PC balance", and even narrower than caring about intra-PC balance.

And even exactly what you describe, I have seen happen, though only with teenagers - i.e. designing a character specifically to be better at something than another PC. That's rare because it's immature. I can think of specific examples from Rifts and CP2020 (and even SW D6 actually). And let's not even get started on Amber.

But what's common, and perhaps outside your narrow definition is people caring that their PC seems generally ineffective compared to the other PCs. That's the thing. For example, the Rogue, objectively, in 2E, was pretty effective, in a pure "PvW" sense. But compared to the other PCs? Hah. No. He could put in gigantic effort to achieve something other PCs could achieve with a few spells or just by hacking through bodies.

But D&D? Never really felt like the balance was bad enough to ruin the game or give me a bad experience

This is just about where you set the bar though. Ruin is an extremely high bar (npi). Degrade or lessen is a much lower bar. I've only ever seen AD&D/D&D get "ruined" by bad balance in 3.XE, where we had a situation where with a couple of unoptimized badly-multiclassed PCs were in a group with a couple of well-oiled powergamers and a borderline munchkin. I wasn't DMing (I was one of the powergamers). That was just profoundly unfun for basically everyone except the munchkin (and even he wasn't having that great of a time). When some people's PCs are just failing at everything, it gets noticeable, and 3E was pretty bad for that.

4E and 5E though it's never done more than mildly degrade an experience. I've seen people clearly having less fun because their PCs just aren't effective, but outright not having fun at all? No. Still I think trying to go through an entire campaign with a suboptimal PC might really drain some people (not everyone, some people are just immune to it).

Actually I also saw it in very early 2E, before we started basically just letting everyone roll until they had half-decent stats. Plenty of PCs in the early days were just jokes compared to other PCs and it clearly wasn't at all fun in some cases (esp. as 2E PCs didn't usually die like flies).

 

[Doug McCrae]

If one player's character is strictly better at the main shtick of another's character - that can cause problems.

Niche protection. That's a great point, Mort.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Absolutely! And multiple kinds of PC balance at that.

First I care that no one feels overshadowed and no one feels like the load, being carried by the rest of the party. If, if one player is missing, there's a big TPK chance when there isn't if another player is missing something has gone wrong.

Second I care that characters should be able to do what it says on the tin. That they are actually good at what they are supposed to be and e.g. the Rogue isn't overshadowed by a couple of spells. Or the fighter isn't overshadowed by a self-buffing cleric. If the game is supposed to have niche protection then it should be there.

Third, I care that no one is left out of major parts of the game. Cyberpunk's hackers and Shadowrun's deckers (or is it the other way round?) are deeply flawed because they leave everyone sitting round for half an hour while they do their thing in a mini-game. But it's only slightly worse than the problem of the wizard being able to teleport and summon walls of stone while the fighter is good at swinging a sharpened piece of metal.

Caring about all these are, for me as a DM, part of caring about the game itself and that the players are having fun. And even when I'm not DMing I want everyone to have fun.

 

[Derren]

It was the first time I played RIFTS. I created a "regular" character which seemed pretty typical. SDC weapons and gear, worked with the DM who seemed fine and didn't give me any hint of what was gonna happen.

All the other experienced players started with PCs like Glitter Boys, with heavy hitting MDC weapons.

It was not fun.

Yeah, that is the kind of things that give Rifts some of its bad image.
Rifts doesn't follow the trend to allow the player everything in the book and ensure that its playable. The GM is supposed to restrict classes so that everyone is balanced for the type of campaign he wants.

In Shadowrun too the main way to ensure balance is talking with the players to either get them to make their characters better or to drop some of their optimization.

Although in those games there is always the option of shifting the spotlight to something where the minmaxer doesn't shine. But you have to be careful with that as the minmaxer too can get bored when not allowed to shine for too long.

Third, I care that no one is left out of major parts of the game. Cyberpunk's hackers and Shadowrun's deckers (or is it the other way round?) are deeply flawed because they leave everyone sitting round for half an hour while they do their thing in a mini-game. .

No, thats correct.
But in SR this only applies to long distance decking. If the decker moves with the team the problem is turned around and iften a combat is over before he can do anything which is also not ideal.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Each player needs to be able to have their character effectively contribute. If one player's character is strictly better at the main shtick of another's character - that can cause problems.

This is very true, and can also create problems if some part of the game is essentially "mandatory", but certain classes/archetypes/characters are just inherently really bad at it (or the game lies and tells players they don't need to be good at it). It's all very well telling people that they can make a scientist with no combat skills and it'll be awesome, but if you then have a game that is 90% shootouts and break-ins (and this may be the official campaign for the game that encouraged you to play a scientist) and you can't mechanically contribute much, that's going to suck.

In Shadowrun too the main way to ensure balance is talking with the players to either get them to make their characters better or to drop some of their optimization.

I've never seen an edition of Shadowrun where any official advice was given to this effect, so I'm not sure it's really intended.

 

[Mort]

In almost 40 years of gaming, only one time did I ever play a game where the imbalance was so severe that I felt the game sucked and was unplayable.

It was the first time I played RIFTS. I created a "regular" character which seemed pretty typical. SDC weapons and gear, worked with the DM who seemed fine and didn't give me any hint of what was gonna happen.

All the other experienced players started with PCs like Glitter Boys, with heavy hitting MDC weapons.

It was not fun.

Yeah, RIFTS made no pretense at balance and it was up to the DM to ensure it - which they usually didn't.

I had a similar experience with Deadlands (Hell on Earth):

Got invited to a game. Emailed the DM and asked what kind of characters were already in the group, what was the power level etc. Response was that there were varied Characters, low power level, low key game. So OK,

I create a bounty hunting character who's shtick is tracking and being decent with a gun. Expressly stayed away from funky backgrounds and powerful types like sykers, doomsayers etc.

I get to the game - everyone else has a powerful background, some have 2(which I didn't even think was legal) basically I was a mundane in a group full of supers.

As a final indignity. The first thing that happened was a villain stole something from the group and ran for it. I stepped up and tried to track the character; only to learn the villain had used some kind of "item" that made nomagical tracking impossible. I gave that group one more session and then stopped coming.

 

[Doug McCrae]

low level D&D.

Now I think about it, I have seen an unbalanced PC in low level D&D, which the GM rightly banned before it even entered play.

It was 2e AD&D and we all rolled our stats on 4d6/best 3 except Stan who pulled a PC out of his infamous folder with an 18/00 strength.

EDIT: And full plate iirc.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No.