Game Balance, what is it to you, why is it important, and what if you all but threw it out?

[1QD]

I have heard of many games speak of game balance, and have often struggled with many of the ideas presented as such. My easiest example is a reference to DnD 2nd edition Dragons. I always wondered, how do you rationalize a scaley walking fire breathing barn, having the same HP as a 12th Lvl fighter? At they time they were adamant about , oh its all about the minions, and the magic spell repertoire...etc. etc. But it never really sat well with me. In my own game dragons have hundreds and often thousands of HP, and hit multiple targets at once, and have multipliers on dmg. Suffice to say there have been very few dragon slayers in my world lol. I tried to base my rule system on what made sense rather than DnD's approach. What are your talking points for or against game balance of this nature?

 

[Sacrosanct]

1. It's a fantasy game. Trying to model realism is a fool's folly. Even back in 1e, they describe HP as mostly being skill and luck at higher levels rather than actual physical damage absorption.

2. Even if you were to model reality, a single gun can take out an elephant. A single harpoon can take out a whale. So it's not out the realm to think a bunch of magical weapon hits can take out a dragon.

On a personal note, I would not want to play a game where you're just spending dozens or more rounds doing the HP attrition slog. As a game designer myself, I think there are better ways to make combat more challenging than just adding more HP.

 

[Reynard]

"Balance" is important when their is competition. This might not be direct competition -- it might be competition for spotlight time, for example. Imbalance also potentially feels bad for players -- especially if characters are not balanced in a way to allow everyone to shine and contribute equally. This si where D&D complaints about martials and casters comes from, for example, and is why you typically build Superman and Batman on the same number of points in a supers RPG, despite that being fundamentally incompatible with the source material.

Games that are about story have a lot more latitude when it comes to balance. The important stuff that happens doesn't rely on numbers on the character sheet.

 

[billd91]

I have heard of many games speak of game balance, and have often struggled with many of the ideas presented as such. My easiest example is a reference to DnD 2nd edition Dragons. I always wondered, how do you rationalize a scaley walking fire breathing barn, having the same HP as a 12th Lvl fighter? At they time they were adamant about , oh its all about the minions, and the magic spell repertoire...etc. etc. But it never really sat well with me. In my own game dragons have hundreds and often thousands of HP, and hit multiple targets at once, and have multipliers on dmg. Suffice to say there have been very few dragon slayers in my world lol. I tried to base my rule system on what made sense rather than DnD's approach. What are your talking points for or against game balance of this nature?

If dragons are so skewed that they're essentially off the table as far as being a reasonable challenge for PCs to take on, why stat them up at all? Just treat them as a force of nature or something that generates situations rather than actually serve as combat opponents.
The fact is, a GM can concoct all sorts of unbeatable challenges - but what's the point in doing so?

 

[Micah Sweet]

1. It's a fantasy game. Trying to model realism is a fool's folly. Even back in 1e, they describe HP as mostly being skill and luck at higher levels rather than actual physical damage absorption.

2. Even if you were to model reality, a single gun can take out an elephant. A single harpoon can take out a whale. So it's not out the realm to think a bunch of magical weapon hits can take out a dragon.

On a personal note, I would not want to play a game where you're just spending dozens or more rounds doing the HP attrition slog. As a game designer myself, I think there are better ways to make combat more challenging than just adding more HP.

1. Fantasy does not automatically mean all sense of verisimilitude is meaningless and literally anything goes. It certainly doesn't mean that anyone who disagrees with you on the subject is pursuing a "fool's folly", and suggesting otherwise is dangerously close to declaring other people's fun wrong IMO.

2. It makes sense that a single well-placed attack can bring down a large powerful foe. If you want to model that (and I'm definitely in favor of such), to me it makes more sense to either use an alternative to the hit point system (that can be accessed by certain actions or certain equipment) or simply not use a hit point system at all.

On the other hand, if you can't expect to kill a multi-ton fire-breathing treasure lizard without extreme measures, you avoid the useless slog entirely and attack the situation with more cleverness. Perhaps the high hp, in addition to representing the obvious mass and resilience of such a creature, is a signal that chewing your way through all of it isn't the most efficient path to victory.

I would also remind everyone that the OP's game isn't D&D and is under no obligation to follow its conventions regarding hit points or anything else.

 

[Umbran]

What are your talking points for or against game balance of this nature?

Overpowering the PCs is easy for the GM. It takes no skill, nuance, understanding, or imagination for a GM to dial an adversary up to 11. In that sense, your dragon is unimpressive.

For a traditional RPG, it is very useful for a game to provide for the GM, not so much balance, as a clear understanding of how hazardous adversaries are, and tools for tuning adversaries to the desired level of hazard.

It is also very useful for a game to provide a certain amount of balance between the PCs - if one PC is always more or less effective than the others, that makes work for the GM to even out spotlight time and such.

 

[Sacrosanct]

1. Fantasy does not automatically mean all sense of verisimilitude is meaningless and literally anything goes. It certainly doesn't mean that anyone who disagrees with you on the subject is pursuing a "fool's folly", and suggesting otherwise is dangerously close to declaring other people's fun wrong IMO.

I think you may have misunderstood. Of course things like basic expectations from our real world are important (like gravity) to keep the game running with everyone one the same page of what to expect within the game world. I never said a sense of verisimilitude is meaningless, and I certainly didn't say anyone who disagrees with me is pursuing a fools' folly.

I'm saying trying to model a fantasy game and keep it very realistic is a fool's folly. I know because I've tried it. I bet if you ask all game designers who tried to model a lot of "realism" into their mechanics, 95% would say it's not worth the attempt. You end up with an overly complicated system that has too many factors to account for, and a game that no one wants to play because it's too complex or messy. And a lot of people asking, "Why? We have lightning bolts and flying dragons. Why the arbitrary rules for realism here but not there?" It's also a huge slippery slope of when to use "realism" and when to handwave it away. Especially in a system that uses Hit Points as a core mechanic.

 

[payn]

Recently, there was an article about story vs gameplay. The gist was that you make a good game first, and then flavor it afterwards. That has always made a certain amount of sense to me. So, often the mechanics are in the background, or "under the hood" as I like to say. I dont waste a lot of time trying to make a detailed mapping of how that fight would actually look in reality compared to how it works in the game. What I care about is that the gameplay is fun and it delivers the genre conventions and experiences I expect from it.

This is one of the reasons I like bounded accuracy in 5E so much. It's the first time D&D has a world that makes sense in relation from one being to another. A dragon is awesome, but its vulnerable to an army. So, that specialized commando unit which D&D has been since the beginning is what you need to take one out when an army isnt an option.

 

[Blue]

I have heard of many games speak of game balance, and have often struggled with many of the ideas presented as such.

Game balance is, to me, all of the characters having equal opportunities to get the spotlight.

In games where failure is unfun, primarily those that have combat-to-the-death as common stakes for overcoming challenges, part of game balance is making all character feel like they can contribute equally and that the challenges are ones that they can overcome. In games without the forced storytelling of avoiding downbeats, it's just that everyone gets their moments.

My easiest example is a reference to DnD 2nd edition Dragons. I always wondered, how do you rationalize a scaley walking fire breathing barn, having the same HP as a 12th Lvl fighter?

This has zero to do with game balance.

Also, HP in D&D is at best only loosely correlated to do with how well you physically can handle wounds. If you look at 5e, a hit that does HP literally is not hitting or hurting the PC until they are under half. (2014 PHB pg 196L Hit Points and 197escribing Damage). This is important because D&D isn't trying to simulate reality, it's emulating the tropes and archetypes of it's genre, and the 5e rules (for example) are emulating the Heroic Fantasy genre. Where it's perfectly on-brand for a heroic warrior to be very hard to kill. It's not because they can take the same amount of physical damage, it's that they have the other qualities that make up HPs.

The dragon isn't as weak as a human. The dragon is mighty! It's the hero that has heroic traits of grit and luck and favor that elevates them.

At they time they were adamant about , oh its all about the minions, and the magic spell repertoire...etc. etc. But it never really sat well with me. In my own game dragons have hundreds and often thousands of HP, and hit multiple targets at once, and have multipliers on dmg. Suffice to say there have been very few dragon slayers in my world lol. I tried to base my rule system on what made sense rather than DnD's approach. What are your talking points for or against game balance of this nature?

This is great -- either you're aiming for a different genre which is a good thing to do, or you are positioning dragons as not a combat challenge. Either of those are perfectly valid choices.

 

[Blue]

1. It's a fantasy game. Trying to model realism is a fool's folly. Even back in 1e, they describe HP as mostly being skill and luck at higher levels rather than actual physical damage absorption.

To take what you are saying and go a step further, it's not just folly to model reality, it's actively harmful in many cases.

Because they rules are trying to enforce the tropes and feel of a genre that isn't reality, and that means that making choices based on reality is at best, accidentally correct like a broken clock being right twice a day, but the majority of the time is at odds with the rest of the rules.

On a personal note, I would not want to play a game where you're just spending dozens or more rounds doing the HP attrition slog. As a game designer myself, I think there are better ways to make combat more challenging than just adding more HP.

Oh, so completely agree with this.