Hot take: get rid of the "balanced party" paradigm

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t know if “the GM should communicate what kind of adventure they’re going to run” is a hot take.

One thing I don’t think this thread has hit on is that screen time is something that needs to be balanced! The more your character can do, the more likely you’ll participate in the action. And in systems where weaknesses give you screen time (or more build points), your nemesis, while powerful, is still making the story about your character.

I like Fate for this reason. If we have two people show up this week who play sleuths, we can lower someone’s Notice and raising their Fight for a session. Takes under 10 seconds. And in Fate, even having bad stats in the main conflict type is balanced. Assuming you take consequences, when you concede, you get more fate points.

For a lot of systems, you want a balance of different types of people. Rich, poor, dumb and smart. Angry and placid, greedy and satisfied (or self-satisfied).

This is assuming you’re not playing in pawn stance, where every character is designed to be played at the top of each players' intelligence and intra-party friction is considered a waste of time.

But generally when I’m creating pregens for an adventure, I want to balance not only the ability to solve problems, but the chance to drive play through larger than life personalities.

Examine the pregens I made for a Hawaiian noir (starting on page 17). Very different, all fun and balanced.

Just wanna say "Hell yeah" to "Senegal's Greatest Detective", but these are pretty sweet generally.

 

[TwoSix]

This isn't about being communicative. This is about the GM style that suggests that the world is the world, and it's not the GMs job to engage with the characters, it's the characters' job to engage with the world and bring the characters that are optimized for the challenges that are out there. I think that's a garbage take on GMing, and I've been specifically burned by it in numerous groups over the years. I absolutely refuse to GM that way. If I get a group full of nothing but thieves and con artists, I'm most likely going to twist the game to have more urban intrigue and skullduggery, not dungeon-crawling with undead. Yes, yes, if I want to run something specific, then of course I'm going to make that clear up front so that people can think of character concepts with the campaign's expected theme in mind. But if not, or if their take on how to tackle the theme isn't quite what I expected, then I'm not going to say, "well that sucks, you shoulda build your characters this way instead" because that's bad GMing.

Yes, I'm being deliberately a little over-the-top in how I describe this. It's a bit of a personal pet peeve, plus that's the nature of hot takes.

Where I would push back is that the approach you mention I don't view as "bad DMing", with the important caveat that the focus of play is explicitly stated upfront.

If the DM tells the players "This game is a sandbox, nothing in it changes whether you play 4 wizards or 4 paladins", then to me the onus is on the players to accept those terms and make appropriate characters. If they don't like that game construction, then it needs to be brought up in session zero.

Participants (both DMs and players) who say "No, that kind of game is fine" while secretly resenting the game direction and then undercut/don't engage with the game are the worst kinds of participants.

 

[Wolfpack48]

You left out an important operative word. "Skill play focus minded GMs". Skill and play go together, because skilled play is a specific playstyle. One that's not super popular since about the early 80s, but pockets of it still linger here and there. The whole classic playstyle is specifically geared towards catering to it, and certain elements of the OSR enjoy it too.

It’s not my definition of skilled play either. Puzzle central it ain’t.

 

[payn]

It’s not my definition of skilled play either. Puzzle central it ain’t.

I wasnt using puzzle literally, but shorthand for any obstacle based focus of play.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I wasnt using puzzle literally, but shorthand for any obstacle based focus of play.

My definition would be any challenge that requires player teamwork and thought. It’s the opposite of “I push the Mystery Solving button on my character sheet.”

 

[Desdichado]

Where I would push back is that the approach you mention I don't view as "bad DMing", with the important caveat that the focus of play is explicitly stated upfront.

If the DM tells the players "This game is a sandbox, nothing in it changes whether you play 4 wizards or 4 paladins", then to me the onus is on the players to accept those terms and make appropriate characters. If they don't like that game construction, then it needs to be brought up in session zero.

Participants (both DMs and players) who say "No, that kind of game is fine" while secretly resenting the game direction and then undercut/don't engage with the game are the worst kinds of participants.

Not sure how that's pushing back. I don't disagree with that at all. That said, a lot of people aren't really all that self-aware of their biases in how to play or how to run, so it doesn't occur to them that they're not being communicative about things that they never even think of not assuming as a baseline.

 

[TwoSix]

I wasnt using puzzle literally, but shorthand for any obstacle based focus of play.

I've seen it referred to as "map-and-key" play, which I like. The dungeon is a hidden "board", and the players' goal is to get the high score by extracting the most treasure possible without dying.

 

[payn]

My definition would be any challenge that requires player teamwork and thought. It’s the opposite of “I push the Mystery Solving button on my character sheet.”

Sure, dont see the conflict though.

I've seen it referred to as "map-and-key" play, which I like. The dungeon is a hidden "board", and the players' goal is to get the high score by extracting the most treasure possible without dying.

A more elegant way of describing it, thank you.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Participants (both DMs and players) who say "No, that kind of game is fine" while secretly resenting the game direction and then undercut/don't engage with the game are the worst kinds of participants.

Yeah the incident with Castle Falkenstein was essentially this. I didn't want to play Castle Falkenstein, but the DM and two other players did, and instead of maturely saying "Well, I'll sit this one out guys" or even "I really don't want to, can we play something else?", I stewed and fumed quietly, because I looooooaaaaathed the elitist pro-capitalist oligarch-friendly subtext (well, text in some cases) of Falkenstein (it's almost the opposite to Cyberpunk 2020, like what if Corpos were celebrated as the coolest people in the setting rather than scum and everything in the game was about being a cool Corpo or a willing assistant to them). And then I made a PC who I knew would cause absolute havoc in virtually all situations, whilst being technically setting-appropriate, a surly cowboy with a hardline "respect must be earned, never expected" attitude (in an etiquette-centric setting full of nobles!) and who was incredibly quick with his guns. I did manage to realize what I was doing but only after the game had started. To be fair I was 17.

 

[KYRON45]

OK. I started GMing in 1982, since then I've GMed more than I play. Is that a long enough while to have an opinion here?

You can have any opinion you like. I was suggesting that some players have no idea what goes into being a GM.
Please excuse me i haven't read your autobiography yet...it's on my list though.