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

[payn]

See, and that's the whole entire essence of my "hot take." That whole paradigm is what I call passive-aggressively punishing the players for not building the party that the GM thinks that they need to have in order to succeed. That's not a GM worth his salt. That's very, very, very bad GMing. So bad that I'd hesitate to even play with one who has that attitude. I've been part of groups for years at times in the past where someone had to suck it up and play the cleric even though nobody really wanted to play a cleric, because without one, the party wasn't expected to be successful, for instance, or someone had to play a trap-finding specialist rogue, because otherwise traps would threaten TPKs on a regular basis, etc. Either someone takes it on the chin and the game sucks for them because they're playing a character that they don't want to, or the game sucks for everyone because they're frustrated at constantly getting challenges that have nothing to do with the party, and the smug af GM tells them that it's their fault for not creating a balanced party with all of the traditional roles filled.

I say absolutely and definitively screw that. You want me to go into a dungeon full of undead and stupid af traps when nobody's playing a cleric or trap-finding rogue? No. We'll either go find another dungeon, or skip the dungeons altogether and get involved in smuggling into the Free City with the local organized crime, or something else instead. Two can play at that "I don't care what you are bringing to the table" routine and if a GM plays like that, I'm ready to fight fire with fire as a player, or walk away completely and play with a better GM. It's not like its a high bar to clear or anything.

I think the issue is these are different perspectives on preferences so tossing around "bad" and "good" isnt particularly helpful. Honestly, some folks should preface their comments with "I party like its 1982 still" but they dont. Worse, they speak in universal declarations, so the discussion is directed into positions instead of interests.

So far, we got at least two perspectives. The first is if the idea of a balanced party should be used in any game. I think a lot of folks will say not every game, but certainly D&D. It is a class based game and one in which roles are important to varying degrees based on edition. Which leads to the second perspective, how should a GM and their players approach the game? There is classic, trad, neotrad, etc.. Each will have a different answer to the question, and none of them is right or wrong. However, its important you pick a lane and make it known so folks get where you are coming from. YMMV.

 

[TwoSix]

And that's having DM'd since I was 11 and am now 46. And none of the DMs who started at 30+ I've seen have had "horror story"-level issues either. I will note that pretty much all of them had jobs/experience which meant they possessed the baseline skills I listed above. If someone didn't have any of those skills and was 30+ I think they'd be in as bad a place as a teenager, but I'd also be a little concerned if someone 30+ didn't have any of those skills period lol.

Agreed. Most RPG "horror stories" come down to participants with severely lacking social skills, social intelligence, or simply the ability to act with courtesy and respect to others.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I dont think skill play focused minded GMs and player care about reliability. A dead end is a fine conclusion because there isnt really any purpose to the current delve other than solving puzzles. There is another puzzle just an NPC info dump and neon sign that says "dungeon this way" away.

Hmm, that’s not my definition of “play focused minded GMs.”

 

[Golden Bee]

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.

 

[Rune]

Also some of us never make mistakes that would reach "GM horror story" levels.

To be fair, I think the “horror story-ness” of some of those threads is overstated, sometimes greatly.

 

[Desdichado]

I mean, it's generally understood by most of the posters here (not everyone, of course) that players and DMs who aren't being communicative of their wants and goals for gaming, and willing to walk away from a table that doesn't meet those goals, is exhibiting poor play procedures.

A DM who thinks a balanced party is a near-necessity for his planned adventure to succeed should state that upfront at session zero. If the party doesn't want to do that, he should either modify his plans (or expectations), let the players die, or gracefully withdraw his offer to run a game.

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.

It's a little sad that I feel the need to have to specifically state that, but eh. I guess I've forgotten what posting at ENW can be like sometimes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Agreed. Most RPG "horror stories" come down to participants with severely lacking social skills, social intelligence, or simply the ability to act with courtesy and respect to others.

Exactly exactly! Like stuff that would get you fired immediately at work! Or at least sent to HR or given a stern talking to! And when you're young dumb and full of... vim... and bad ideas and so on, maybe that's more likely. Even then, I personally didn't screw up as a DM (though I definitely did as a player).

Once you're actually sane mature adult who understands that other people exist and have feelings and are worth something, even the potential for most of the grosser errors goes out the window, especially if you're not playing very sex-adjacent or hard-adversarial kind of games. Even then I've run games where there was no shortage of that but like, just have some judgement, don't be as Trailer Park Boys puts it "greasy". Like for example, how hard is it to not use sexual assault in your games? I mean it's clearly too hard for some people I guess... (Looking at you, Dungeon World co-creator whose name escapes me!) but it never occurred to me that was a reasonable thing to include in a game - and again I started in 1989 lol.

Hmm, that’s not my definition of “play focused minded GMs.”

Skill play focused isn't the same as just play focused, I would suggest.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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?

It's not how long you've been playing, it's how well you can slip in references to personally knowing EGG or Dave Arneson while trying* to make it sound casual and not a name-drop.

*And, of course, failing.

 

[Desdichado]

Hmm, that’s not my definition of “play focused minded GMs.”

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.

UPDATE: In fact, it's the lingering elements of skilled play that my hot take is complaining about, to be honest with you, or at least the migration of a skilled play perspective into a trad play game, where it's wildly inappropriate. I actually remember when classic play was still kinda mainstream still, and being unhappy with it. I know exactly why the trad play reaction happened. Sure, sure, as alluded to above, trad struggled with a lot of bad ideas before it finally actually kinda worked out how to work well, but that's because the demand for something that wasn't like skilled play/classic culture was extremely high and people weren't happy with a lot of classic paradigms. If you want to be completely honest, my whole hot take could be boiled down to, "why does this one single classic culture playstyle element endure in games that aren't classic playstyle games?"

 

[Deset Gled]

Hot take: A discussion of balance tools in RPGs is the best non-political* example of "privilege" I can think of.

Any time you played a game and had fun without needing all the balance tools in the game rules, without the DM doing work to balance the party, or without the players putting effort into balance, it's not because those things weren't needed. It's because you were privileged to have a situation where they were already present to the level needed without any extra work.

Sometimes that's because the (spoken or unspoken) social contracts in the group solved the problems. Sometimes it's because the tools were seamless enough in the rules design that no one noticed them. Sometimes that happens because the players were simply happy enough with the amount of agency they had.

In any case, if "balance" wasn't needed for you to enjoy the game: that's great for you! But the fundamental fact is that just because it worked for you doesn't mean that your individual solutions will work for all groups. And generally speaking, the less effort you have to put into balance, the less aware you will be of why the balance in the group is working. You were privileged to have it work without any effort, but you cannot claim that what worked for your group was universal, especially if you have no understanding of why it worked for your group. And even if you did, telling other groups to use your method of making people happy would just be another example of a balance tool.

*Maybe not the right word, but close enough.