How important is game balance to you?

[JonnyP71]

Somewhere between 2 and 3, but then I would say that as the editions I've most enjoyed are 1E, Basic, and 5E - probably in that order. And the other games I've most enjoyed have been CofC, MERP and Paranoia - balance? Ha! Flavour? Hell yeah!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

In my experience, the players and DMs that view it as a competition instead of collaboration have been some of the worst I’ve gamed with.

Roleplaying games are primarily cooperative activities, rather than competitive ones, so balance is really probably the least important thing.

 

[Emerikol]

I like to think that I care somewhat about balance but everytime I get into these discussions I tend to find myself wanting to game with those not as obsessed with it. I'd definitely play 3e over 4e but I wouldn't do so because 3e is less balanced than 4e. To me it is spotlight.

Throughout history D&D has had some classes that were weak sisters. Rogue/Thief anyone? I also prefer a more complete set of options even if some of them are inferior. Perhaps a helpful system where people can be alerted that some feats are suboptimal and only chosen for flavor would help. I think to achieve tremendous balance you have to resort to 4e style game design which to me is just less fun. So it's too great a sacrifice. On the other hand I do want lots of good solid options for all classes.

I also love the flavor of high magic and recently that has kind of fallen flat. I prefer a rules "system" to a set of discrete options without underlying premise.

I almost always DM and rarely play. Of late though I've done neither due to my moving to another town and being busy with work.

 

[Blue]

Okay, let's talk combat for a bit, because of lot fo game systms want peopel to be balanced in combat so everyone feels they contribute and not at all balanced in other things - a party can make do with one party face, or one ranger/explorer.

Balance is a nebulous term, especially since you're often comparing apples and oranges. If we only want to look at the incredibly narrow world of white room combat DPR, you have a metric. But if you are good at that, and I am an excellent healer, are we balanced? You could say that that it's whomever causes the DM to adjust what they are doing more. But that's often very dependant on synergy. You could talk about stealing the spotlight, but that's often out of control of the mechanics. You can talk about not feeling overshadowed and having fun, but now we're back to subjective metrics.

In the 13th Age game I've been running for the past 3 years, probably the most efficient character is the dwarforged fighter, who's a pure defender. I say he's that much more effective than anyone else judging from combats he's missed. But he does a fairly thankless and non-spotlight job of allowing all the others to shine. End result - no complains that he isn't balanced.

I'd rather look at balance not on a character level but on a much more focused level where we really can do apples-to-apples. If there were two feats, and one gave +d4 to damage and another gave +5 damage and a bonus action attack, it's pretty clear that they both have the same goal - so -it's apples-to-apples - and are vastly different in the power level they grant in fulfilling it. That's a very useful balance evaluation.

So balance is a useful fiction but not everything.

 

[Ath'kethin]

I structure my game so that each of the PCs is the focus of different aspects of it. The warlock is not very effective at combat; in fact, we joke about how he ends up making death saves pretty much every session. The barbarian is not very witty or charming, but it a straight shooter and the most generally trustworthy of the group. Plus he just slaughters foes. The rogue is a smooth talker and cheat, and also just cleans up in combat due to his use of poisons.

Are they balanced with one another? Who cares? The players love the game and the campaign and so do I.

 

[aramis erak]

I voted vital - but...

What I want balanced is ability of all major archetypes of the setting to participate in story, with equal combat ability being only a minor consideration.

 

[CapnZapp]

Ideally, you'd want it to only be twice as effective in some situations. Like maybe the Greatspoon does a lot of damage to a single target, but the Laserforks let you split your attacks and that is super useful against a lot of small targets. Which isn't the case in D&D 5, since even an orc is unlikely to drop from an off-hand attack, but it could have been the case if the designers had tried harder.

The best way to avoid the tyranny of balance is to avoid creating options that are directly comparable. Qualitative differences make quantitative differences less relevant.

Yes, that Greatspoon Mastery feat allows you to do different stuff than Expert Laserforks.

Even so, there needs to be a discussion:

Without feats, Greatspoon does 20% more damage than Laserforks. With feats, how much more damage differential is reasonable?

Even if the diff stays at 20% or even contracts, the feat could still be attractive (say both feats double the damage; the diff then stays at 20%).

Even a greater diff could be reasonable, assuming Laserforks does something else that the damage-focused Greatfork Mastery doesn't do. But since damage is unquestionably the #1 metric people are looking at, the wisest solution is probably to make a damage focused feat applicable to all or nearly all weaon choices (possibly a selection of many feats that ultimately all yield a comparable damage increase).

ONLY offering a Greatspoon Mastery that doubles the damage output, and ONLY offering a Expert Laserforks feat that, I don't know, converts all damage to fire damage, or lets you carve up steaks more easily for what I care, is probably a mistake.

Since it funnels every gamer that focuses on DPR into using greatspoons.

This creates an unwanted frustration "if I want to deal damage, my weapon of choice is limited. I find Laserforks a cool and interesting weapon style, but I can't ignore how I then lose out on double damage".

Plenty of gamers will only look twice at those options that offer best in class performance or close to it. These gamers will find that their freedom of choice is severely curtailed by the existence of a Greatspoon Mastery feat that doubles damage.

By removing that feature from the GSM feat, suddenly the number of acceptable choices grow dramatically. This is good for the game.

 

[Blue]

Having said that, what is 'really' important is that every character gets about equal time in the limelight. In a game that is mostly about combat, that means, that every character must be able to contribute meaningfully. In a game with a mix of social, combat, and other types of encounters, that's less important. It can be okay, if some characters suck at certain types of encounters, as long as the encounters don't take a whole session to resolve.

In terms of combat, buffers, healers and defenders get the spotlight a lot less than then characters that do something flashier, but people like playing them and people like having them in their party.

Are they inherently imbalanced?

 

[Lanefan]

There's too many kinds of balance to properly shoehorn into a single answer in the poll (though I voted anyway), so allow me to expand it a bit.

- micro-combat-balance - is everyone's damage-per-round the same? Not important at all. Some classes are damage-dealers, some aren't.
- micro-stage-time-balance - does each player and-or character get a chance to shine in every encounter? Not important. Some encounters suit some characters better than others.
- macro-combat-balance - can everyone somehow usefully help in most combats? Somewhat important, more so if you track individual xp.
- macro-stage-time-balance - does each player and-or character get vaguely-even stage time over the long run? Quite important.
- stat balance between characters - not important.
- level balance between characters - not important if imbalance is minor, becomes more important the greater the imbalance becomes
- wealth balance between characters - not important if imbalance is minor, becomes more important the greater the imbalance becomes
- ability balance between classes over the long haul - not important as long as the imbalances somewhat cancel each other out in a better-at-this, worse-at-that or better-now, worse-later sort of way
- benefit-vs.-drawback balance - extremely important. It's easy to give benefits to characters/classes/etc. but without some corresponding drawbacks everyone just becomes good at everything, and if you're good at everything then why do you need a party to adventure with?

Lanefan

 

[Celebrim]

After all, a perfectly balanced game is this:

Everybody roll 1d6. Highest roll wins.

Fun, eh?

How do you feel about balance?

I feel you've left me nothing to vote on in your poll.

Balance isn't everything, but if it is lacking, it can be crippling to your game. Your fortune mechanic is potentially crippling to a game as well, something very like it was used in Space 1889 IIRC, but it's less crippling than poor balance.

The reason your fortune mechanic could be crippling is that it is has no granularity, and can poorly cope with changes in difficulty and skill. As such it can be hard to use it to mechanically define a role for the player, or to provide any sort of character progression. But in a game that isn't intended to go for very long, a simple fortune mechanic like that might not be a problem.

Imagine you are playing a martial arts computer game - lets call it 'Karateka'. Initially, you are amazed by the smooth animation and the apparent depth of the combat system. You can make high, low, and side kicks, straight punches, upper cuts, and body punches. You can make blocks. You can assume a fighting stance, run, bow and so forth. And the game is different than a lot games you've played, in that once you commit to an action, you have to finish it before you can do anything else. So you have to plan ahead. And your foes have the exact same moves you do. You have to out think them. Wow this is cool. Wow this is so challenging. This goes about three screens and then you make a realization.

All the attacks take the same amount of time to make. There is no advantage to a punch. The attacks can all be rated by range. Your longest ranged attack is a side kick. If you throw it, the enemy will either block, throw there own side kick resulting in both sides blocking, or be hit by the attack. There are no other outcomes and no way for the enemy to move through your kick range fast enough to throw another attack - which wouldn't matter anyway because all attacks have the same speed. The whole game comes down to throwing a series of side kicks continually. After some initial experiments, this proves trivially easy to do. Every one and a while you get attacked by the bird, which might require a high kick, but the bird is just another timing problem. There is no strategy to it.

There is literally no thinking involved in the game at all. It's harder to figure out that you need to stand and bow to the princess than defeat any part of the game. Once you figure out the 'secret', you go from struggling to finishing the game in a 40 minutes of continuous side kicking.

Poor balance is like that. It's like opening a 500 page RPG, ogling excitedly all the options and all the characters you could create, and then realizing that the rules are such that you either could play a character that rolls a d6, or you could play a character that rolls a d20. All the complexity is trivialized and smoothed over. The rules might as well be 15 pages long, and have just a single character option. So you ban the d20 character, and in doing so you vastly improve the game.

Unfortunately, in the real world, you rarely can fix the balance that easily.

Is balance everything? No. But it's foundational.