Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder outselling D&D

[Guest 85555]

You can chalk everything up to the subjective nature of game design if you want to.

I could create a "game" in which I push a button and the other three players lose. It wouldn't be much of a game, and [
That's nonsense.

Game design, as with all fields, has its standard best practices, its worthy tenets, its theories, and its success stories. You can tell me "I don't care much about balance," all day long, but at the end of the day your average person appreciates a level of attention to balance in their games that - at the very least - prevents them from getting hung up on ridiculously unbalanced gameplay.

I dont think this born out by these discussions at all. clearly there are lots of players who disagree with you about what constitutes balance and how important balance should be. Anyone who embraces your standard will please players like yourself and upset players like me and others who have taken my position. Good design is about realizing who you are writing for and what you are trying to achieve. Applying one standard to all games and all audiences is not only bad design, its bad business. How important balance factors into the design of a game and the kind of balance employed should depend on the thongs i've outlined above.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

That's nonsense. An individual's tastes are subjective. Your typical person's tastes are, however, understood and catered to.

No one disputes this. What is disputed is the implied assertion that "typical" represents 90% of all people (and thus an objective "One True Way"), whereas others assert that "typical" is actually itself split, for example 50% Gamer Type A, 30% Type B, and 20% Type C. When there are fairly large fractions of a population with very disparate views on (the subjective) definition of what makes a good game, you're bound to butt heads with them.

Forunately people in the industry recognize the existence of large if not majority audiences. This (obviously) is how come we can have, for example, different games competing for the the top spot.

 

[Guest 85555]

Also i never said i dont care about balance, just that I prefer balance by campIgn rather than by individual encounters. However i also know lots of gamers who want like having the ability to make better or worse characters, for some team members who make good character creation choices to be rewarded with better characters. You represent a sizeable groups, i do as well and so too do these other folk.

 

[prosfilaes]

Once again I'm not entirely sure if you actually even get the concept of game balance in that you keep on trying to argue how homogeneous it will be.

You guys keep saying that; you don't plan on explaining anything soon, do you?

Dude. We used the world's most perfect example of a sports team. The problem is that the points flew right over everyone's head as people started arguing that a perfect sports team would be one that would have everyone who exceled at everything.

For a baseball team to be balanced in a roleplaying sense, each player would have equal impact on the game. The pitcher can pitch a no-hitter; what can the third-baseman do that has that much impact on the game?

 

[prosfilaes]

Nonsense. Balance between players is a key component and a critical consideration of nearly every sport out there.

Proof by assertion. You haven't even responded to the couterexamples.

And what makes you think that balance between teams doesn't count?

Because that translates in RPGs to making the adventure not too easy or too hard for the players.

I challenge you: go ask the guys at WotC whether balance is a major consideration when developing a new set. You're bonkers if you believe they'll answer "No."

Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer. Ask them if they make every card of equal power, and they'll tell you no. Ask them if every deck is of equal power, and they'll laugh; part of the point of Magic is that deck building is part of the game. In Magic, part of the game is realizing which deck concepts suck and which don't. If we carried that over into D&D 3, part of the game would be realizing the Fighter sucks and the Cleric doesn't.

Chess.

Checkers.

Scrabble.

I could go on.

Except that not one of those is what I asked for, an asymmetric board game. Every single one of those is an example of balance by homogeny.

 

[Dannager]

Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer. Ask them if they make every card of equal power, and they'll tell you no. Ask them if every deck is of equal power, and they'll laugh; part of the point of Magic is that deck building is part of the game.

Again, the point isn't that you need perfect balance. The point is that balance considerations need to be a priority in games.

In Magic, part of the game is realizing which deck concepts suck and which don't. If we carried that over into D&D 3, part of the game would be realizing the Fighter sucks and the Cleric doesn't.

This doesn't strike you as a poor way to put an RPG together?

Except that not one of those is what I asked for, an asymmetric board game. Every single one of those is an example of balance by homogeny.

Sure, we can have at it:

Shadows over Camelot, and Battlestar Galactica. It took me like thirty seconds to come up with those, I'm sure I could come up with more.

 

[Hussar]

A question, to folks with a better business sense than me:

To what extent does "balance" actually matter in (1) selling a game, and (2) maintaining a customer base?

I'd assume that the vast majority of gamers are casual gamers, not armchair game theorists or designers, so I'd guess that as a selling point "balance" would be practically invisible, way behind obvious things like marketing, production values, outreach (eg, Encouters, etc), and word of mouth.

I could see that balance might help in retaining customers, though even that I see as secondary to things like supplement support, availability of other players of that game, quality of those players (eg, social interaction), and the like. That is to say, I'd think that factors external to the game would quite possibly be at least as important to the casual gamer as the game itself.

Thoughts?

As was mentioned, I think balance very much could have an impact on game sales. A game with little or no balance will suffer during play. If element X strongly overshadows other options, then it won't take too long for even casual gamers to recognize that.

And, even in a group with casual players, it's unlikely that everyone in the group would be casual. The casual players getting stuffed in the trunk by the more active players would also lead to poor play at the table.

I played OWoD for a while. Now there was a system that was ridiculously easy to break. You actually had to try not to break it I found. And, you could break it even by keeping with genre conventions. Put 5 pips in Wealth for example means that you can throw money at most problems and they'll go away. And, being a very wealthy, hundreds of years old vampire is hardly breaking genre, look at the Underworld movies.

I found that my group dropped Vampire pretty quickly simply because it got so annoying to not break the system.

So, IMO, yes, game balance will greatly impact sales. An unbalanced system will not have the staying power of a balanced system simply because of replayablility.

 

[prosfilaes]

Again, the point isn't that you need perfect balance. The point is that balance considerations need to be a priority in games.

No one is arguing against balance in games; at least most of us aren't. Where this started was when you were insisting that balance was so important that it justified an endless stream of errata, that everyone should be happy that WotC is continually trying to microadjust the balance on D&D 4.

Balance was one of the priorities on D&D 3. It certainly gave way to certain other priorities, but it was there.

This doesn't strike you as a poor way to put an RPG together?

So it strikes you as a poor way to put an RPG together? So why are you using it as an example of how balance is important, if the type of balance it uses is bad for RPGs?

Sure, we can have at it:

Shadows over Camelot, and Battlestar Galactica. It took me like thirty seconds to come up with those, I'm sure I could come up with more.

So we're now talking about two games that were made in 2005 and 2008, that don't have a long history of successful balance. You're talking semi-cooperative games, where it's basically most of the players against one or two and the game. You're talking about six player games where the person who happens to draw the traitor card is much more likely to win then the other players, but it doesn't matter because you're playing against the game as much as the traitorous players. I'd say both of them are very unbalanced on a player-by-player sense.

 

[prosfilaes]

I found that my group dropped Vampire pretty quickly simply because it got so annoying to not break the system.

So, IMO, yes, game balance will greatly impact sales. An unbalanced system will not have the staying power of a balanced system simply because of replayablility.

And yet Vampire was one of the most successful RPGs in history. So its lack of balance obviously didn't hurt it much.

 

[Hussar]

And yet Vampire was one of the most successful RPGs in history. So its lack of balance obviously didn't hurt it much.

Was, of course, being the operative word.

And, let's not forget why Vampire did so well - it actually brought in an entirely new demographic into gaming.

But, even as successful as Vampire was, it didn't survive. It's not even a blip on the radar anymore.

Managing a brief stint of selling better than 2e twenty years ago isn't exactly a stellar success when, 20 years later, you're down to pdf only and pretty much out of the RPG industry.