Is it really so important that everything is equal?

[Imagicka]

Have you ever played the old World of Darkness games, the ones published before 2004? In a nutshell, this sort of thing was the rule rather than the exception. But it added to the flavor and tension of the games rather than make players question the design and rules of the game (most of them, anyway).

True enough. I never let anyone play anything under 11th Gen., because I saw no reason to let anyone play a powerful character. But I always saw WoD as being games where it's more about the setting and roleplaying than it was about the fire-power, killing things, and taking their stuff.

If you were a neonate vampire, you couldn't just go mouth off to your sire or the Prince unless you were very careful about it. If you happened to run into a Tremere with maxed out Thaumaturgy or a Gangrel with even median Protean (all possible for brand-new characters with no experience) they could ruin your night pretty quickly. And that's not to mention werewolves, who typically could reduce a vampire of roughly equal experience into a bloody smear on the wall pretty easily. For young vampires, you couldn't just run in and bash everything you wanted. You were a very small fish in a very big pond. To survive, you had to engage in warfare socially and politically. You either made some friends or you didn't survive very long. Things usually ended badly if your first response was to try to directly attack anything. There was no question of 'balance,' because it was obvious that the deck was stacked against you.

Which is something akin to making all your NPCs high level. Which is something I personally think every DM should do. But of course, this meant that the NPCs were all these big fish. Which is all perfectly fine. You want to mouth off to a Primogen, or the Prince... or to put it into context of D&D... the Chancellor to the King, or the Duke, or the Grand-Magus. Well, I never had any problems with telling someone that because they were getting lippy with Prince, chances are they are going to be arrested and executed, now if you want to cause a problem and excalate the situation until 50 palace guards are firing bolts into your body... it's still going to end up the same result.

But of course, I would never allow people to play cross-genre games. We're not playing werewolf-vampire-changeling-mage. Nor would I, with any 'group' of players, allow them to play characters of different generations that wasn't at the very most, one or perhaps even two generations away from each other.

To me, these games prove the idea that the entire world CAN be out to get you and the game is still fun to play. The idea that you can't rely on your cool new powers to solve most of your problems (because everyone else has the ability and inclination to tear you into a bloody pulp if you buck the status quo) made the game far more interesting and complex than the mechanics would lead you to believe.

Exactly. Maintaining the Masquerade... whatever you want to call it... was part of the game. Very rarely does the necessity for such thing exist in D&D. Not that I'm opposed to such things. In my game world, arcane-casters are hunted down and killed by paladins and clerics.

But to get back on topic. Does there need to be balance between the NPCs and the PCs? No. Not in the slightest. (and I'll stick with Vampire here... not that there was anything wrong with the other games... who am I kidding? Wraith blew... and Changeling! Well, despite the fact that I have a bit of a claim to fame with that book... it wasn't World of Darkness) The Justicars are there to bring down justice upon thine head, and if need be, impale you upon it. But there was relative balance between the clans. Yeah, if you were a ventrue... you would use what you had to your advantage... your not going to go toe-to-toe against a Brujah in a boxing match, but your definately going to attempt to dominate them while he attempts to pummel your pretty face. Just be happy you don't bruise!

Now, someone mentioned the Caitiff in vampire. As far as I remember, they were pretty much dead on in regards to being evenly powered with the other classes. Sure, they didn't have 'clan support' to fall back on. But, seriously, did the gangrels? But then, it's was an advantage to pick your disciplines. Just like everyone else, they had their advantages and disadvantages.

Too bad I missed the discussions about two-weapon fighting... sounds like something I would have loved to pontificate about.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Take two games. We will, for the moment, assume they are each as interesting, varied, and fun as the other.

In one we have outrageous imbalance problems. In the other we don't.

Why not play the one that doesn't?

There's nothing inherent in keeping an eye to balance that says we have to make things bland and uninteresting. It is a balancing act, of course, but it's just unrealistic to decide that since the platonic ideal is unattainable we should scrap the exercise and run wild in the streets.

You don't play Ars Magica assuming that the Magus and the grog are supposed to do the same things. The imbalance is written into the game for a purpose. It's just not the same game at all, the "balance" sought is a different thing. If there was an option available that made a grog more powerful than a Magus, would that be imbalanced? Suddenly when some people are supposed to be playing grogs to the Magus and we give each of the grogs a man-portable shoulder-fired tactical nuclear device we've got a problem.

I think FUN things can be designed which are BALANCED things. Not doing so is sloppy and nothing more. It may not be a perfect balance, but obvious glaring imbalances for the sake of "New Shiny and Fun" isn't cool. Just unpolished.

--fje

 

[Storyteller01]

Are gamers really so obsessed by efficiency that they don't take a sub-par feat or skill if they can take something more powerful?

You see it pretty much anywhere a hobbies being around for awhile. Gardeners look for the best ways to grow things, bakers get the new frosting layering bags, etc. Unfortunately, D&D doesn't have any means for this activity to be satisfying beyond 'HAH!! I beat you!!'.

 

[MerricB]

You don't play Ars Magica assuming that the Magus and the grog are supposed to do the same things. The imbalance is written into the game for a purpose. It's just not the same game at all, the "balance" sought is a different thing.

It really has to be noted that, in Ars Magica, a player is not expecting to spend the entire game playing the grog. Balance is achieved by rotating the roles around. In a particular session of Ars Magica, there is definite imbalance, but it's hoped that over the course of the campaign it all evens out.

In a game that ignores mechanics as a form of challenge resolution, relying on storytelling and roleplaying instead, then any game balance is immaterial. It's just who is the best talker. Obviously, in games like Vampire this can occur.

In a game that does use mechanics to resolve challenges, then balance *does* matter.

Cheers!

 

[Imagicka]

...Suddenly when some people are supposed to be playing grogs to the Magus and we give each of the grogs a man-portable shoulder-fired tactical nuclear device we've got a problem...

"Your going to backstab him with a ballista?!?"

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I am a big fan of people making meaningful choices. If a feat is so bad or so good as to be a no-brainer, that suggests to me that there's a problem with the feat.

Who let this Eurogamer into the party?

 

[pemerton]

I think the more crunch-oriented your group is, the more weight balance issues have. So you do see the pursuit of balance quite often with a crunch-heavy system. Some degree of balance is necessary, but I think it can get taken to an extreme, and becomes a distraction.

A good role-player is probably more interested in a character who is not absolutely optimal in every area, because they tend to be far more interesting characters to play. But they tend not to be the sort of people who obsess about 'balance' anyway.

I don't see that there is a conflict between roleplaying and a serious interest in mechanics, including mechanically effective characters. I don't see what is uninteresting about playing a mechanically effective character - King Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, Conan, Gandalf, Aragorn, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, just to name a few fantasy figures, all did pretty interesting things. Far more than the typical maimed commoner.

As Brother McLaren noted, it is actually a roleplaying challenge to explain why a character deliberately pursues sub-optimal strategies.

A smart player can make any class work and even seem powerful where an unskilled player could make a munchkin number crunched character look pathetic.

[O]ptions that are "more equal" benefit casual players (or players less concerned with mechanical superiority). While options that are "less equal" benefit more "skilled" players (or players more concerned with mechanical superiority).

So, the real "balance" question is, how much better should the character of a "skilled" player be than the character of a casual player? Once you answer this question, you will be able to determine how much power variation you are prepared to accept.

As the two quoted passages show, there are two elements to skilled play: effective play of a given character, and effective building of a character from the permitted rules elements. It is a strength of a roleplaying game, I think, that its rules permit effective play to make a difference to outcomes. Assuming all the players are working as a party, this sort of skill works to everyone's benefit.

But I'm less sure that it's a strength for a great deal of skill, or possession of certain rulebooks, to be needed to build an effective character. This introduces a competitive element between players (like deck-building in M:TG), which does not contribute to everyone's enjoyment. I prefer rules which are (within the limits that result from their complexity) reasonably transparent as to the effectiveness of the options they create, and which price those options accordingly. As D&D really only has a few pricing options - feat slots, skill points, level gains and PrC prereqs - a high degree of balance in each of these elements seems desirable to me.

A secondary consideration is, how easy is it for the DM to make a less powerful option just as useful as a more powerful option? The DM's ability to present challenges in which a technically less powerful option is more useful than a technically more powerful option can make the relative power of the options irrelevant.

Also it depends on the DM, if they actually play the monsters and NPC's with intelligence and use good strategy against the "powerful" players.

I don't think that DM retribution is an effective substitution for mechanical balance. First, it undermine verisimilitude if the mechanically effective character is always the first target of every foe or other misfortune. Second, and more importantly, this can lead to bad blood between the player in question, and the DM.

I'd say that there can be better and worse options, limits be damned.

Balance is a myth which is destroying D&D from the inside, out.

Different things are better depending on the situation. A fireball isn't much use underwater, etc.

Levels are relative only to themselves - a 5th level Rogue should be a better Rogue than a 1st level one, and that's all. Other comparisons shouldn't apply. Trying to balance the unlike (a 5th level Paladin with a 5HD monster, for example) is both counter-productive and pointless. That's where the whole debacle of CR/EL and Level Adjustments started. It should have been drowned at birth.

Simplify, don't obfuscate. That should be the mantra. Instead we have pointless stats that only exist to blur the meta-game. Silly, silly, silly.

Obviously I don't agree with the first few sentences of this post. But I do agree with the criticism of pointless complexity that blurs the meta-game. This undermines the sort of rules transparency I argued for above.

 

[pemerton]

Pick any other role-playing game - /any/ game at all - and you won't find anything like the kind of arguments over "balance" that D&D generates.

Rolemaster players don't moan that the Nightblade is better than a Fighter, or a Warmage is unbalancing. They just pick the class they like, come up with a cool backstory, generate a unique character, and play.

As a long-time RM player, I can confidently say that balance is an issue, at least with my playing group. And indeed, I have spent the last few days in a long dispute on the RM forums about whether or not a 1st level spell is too good (http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=2729).

I do think balance does not come up as often in RM as in D&D, however. RM character development is very fine-grained: characters have between 40 and 100+ points per level (depending on rules-set used and other factors) to spend on character building, which allows a very precise pricing of abilities; spells are ranked from 1st to 20th or higher level, and most spell-using characters have access to several dozen spells at least; characters have well-defined abilities relevant to a range of non-combat activities; bonuses in both combat and non-combat spells range from +5 to +150 or more; combat combines a series of attack tables which make damage highly dependent on skill with a series of crit tables that make additional damage, ranging from a handful of extra hits up to instant death, depend to a signficant (but far from total) extent on luck.

The combination of fine-grainedness in development, bonuses and spells, with the capacity for character development in a number of different areas of expertise, and the role of luck in determining critical damage, means that direct comparisons of character effectiveness are nowhere near as common as in D&D. For example, it is very hard to precisely compute a character's combat effectiveness in a typical scenario, given the number of considerations and variables that can come into play. And even a character who is clearly weaker in a given situation than another can still play a meaningful role - the difference between a bonus of +130 and a bonus of +150, when added to a d100 roll, is often not that great.

D&D differs from this in almost every respect. Character development options are extremely coarse-grained: there are skill points, feat slots, level gains and PrC pre-reqs. Spell slots and levels are coarse-grained also. The mechanical function of attack bonuses and damage dice makes average damage exteremely easy to compute and compare, and the fact that combat is won by attrition of hit points makes such comparisons crucial to rational character design. The net outcome is that a combat that is a challenge to the best fighter in the party has a good chance of being one in which a sub-optimal fighter can make next-to-no impact; this is compounded by the all-or-nothing effect of such mechanics as Armour Class and Spell Resistance.

I therefore conclude that, to the extent that balance is more of an issue for D&D players than RM players, this is not because of a flaw of temperament on the part of D&D players, but rather a rational concern that results from clearly identifiable features of the D&D mechanics, that are (I believe deliberately) absent from RM.

That is not to say that RM has better mechanics. D&D mechanics are in many respects easier to learn, and simpler in play. It is only to say that different mechanical choices in system design can have distinctive and identifiable implications for the significance of balance as an issue.

 

[Odhanan]

I believe "Balance" is a good theoretical principle when building a rules system. There shouldn't be options of character development that are so outrageously good as to make every player choose it.

The balance of the rules, however, isn't solely decided by numerical values but what each and every option does in the game, in practice. Two "+1" bonus to two different components of a character are not always equal in game value. For instance, a +1 to attack rolls isn't equal for all intent and purposes to a +1 to a Climb check.

But on which type of practice can you base this idea of value of different game components and their interactions thereof? After all, the gaming styles vary enormously at various game tables. What the designer ends up doing is base the idea of balance on a theoretical game style, how the game is "supposed to be played", and on a pannel of people playing the game, i.e. playtesters. The end result is that rules balance is all fair and good in theory, but you cannot ever predict all the ways in which these rules will be actually used.

"Rules balance" is thus a thing of theory. "Game balance", for me, is what happens in practice, and there, the DM is the one calling the shots. As the rules can never be accurately balanced for a precise game table, it is the DM's job to make sure that all players have equal opportunities to make a difference in the actual game, in combats, in investigations, in character interactions (something rarely covered by a rules' system).

You can have elements of a rules system that are out of theoretical balance. If this is designed for a precise goal within the adventure and it doesn't steal the spotlight from this PC or increase the capabilities of another to a shameful level, that's okay. In the end, the DM and the players (by the choices they make and how they let their fellow players have their fun or not) are the ones making the game balance happen... or not.

 

[greywulf]

Importance is a relative scale; it's not an absolute.

To me, "Balance" is less important than fun, playability, originality, interestingness, whether it fits into the campaign, imagination, flexibility and a whole raft of other requirements. I appreciate that other folks will rate it higher than I do. That's cool. To me though, it's waaaaaaay down the list.

Sure, there's broken classes out there, and stuff which should have been fixed in the playtest before the book is published. It happens. The problem is that one person's "badly broken" is another gal's favourite class. We can't agree what's balanced and what isn't because everyone's games are different. That's good too, and exactly how it should be. So we're just wasting pixels by arguing which classes are balanced and which aren't. I'd rather not waste the time, personally. More things are much, much more important when it comes to my gaming wants and needs.

Besides, this particular GM subscribes to the Tall Poppy Law; the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to Get Hit. It's the perfect balancing mechanic

As I said before, other games don't generate the same kind of traffic about this that D&D does. Sure, there's munchkins and powergamers in every game, and they'll discuss the relative merits of this or that class, but nowhere to the level that D&D gamers do.

I'm just tired of it and just wanna play...........