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Symmetric Balance vs Asymmetric Balance.
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<blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9170959" data-attributes="member: 7030042"><p>I am inclined to say that a team-based roleplaying game is balanced when any set of player characters <strong>(a)</strong> built and played by players with roughly equal skill and engagement <strong>(b)</strong> will contribute to the success of their group (the achievement of each characters' individual goals and/or the goals of the group as a whole) with about equal effectiveness <strong>(c)</strong> across all modes of gameplay deemed to be core to the system (<strong>d)</strong> when viewed over the course of multiple sessions of gameplay.</p><p></p><p>Suffice to say there is room for a lot of variance:</p><p>(1) Players may not be of equal skill. Players who are better at working the mechanics of character-building, or who have a better grasp of applying their know-how to the goings-on in the in-game fiction will contribute to a greater extent - to my mind, regardless of the design effort made to ensure a baseline level of balance. (In TSR-era D&D, with less opportunity for character-building optimisation, discrepancies might be more likely to arise from the way ability scores shook out - there's rather a large difference in melee combat effectiveness between a fighter with 17 Strength versus a fighter with 18/90+ Strength!)</p><p>(2) Players may not engage with the game in equal measure. Looking at D&D, some players might not care about non-combat aspects of play; others might enjoy combat and social interaction but not exploration, and so on. The more or less engaged a player is with a particular expected mode of gameplay, the more or less their character will contribute during gameplay, again, to my mind, regardless of the design effort made towards balance.</p><p>(3) Apropos of "core modes of gameplay", in D&D 5e I am thinking of the idea of the three pillars of play: ideally, each player character should be able to contribute about equally to each pillar of gameplay, if that's what their players want. But it's probably not a concern if the balance of the game falls out of whack in "non-core" modes of play, such as downtime.</p><p>(4) Naturally, some characters will find they are contributing more to a group's success in certain game sessions than in others.</p><p></p><p>The fact of such variance doesn't mean balance as I discern it is not worth designing for, of course. It's just something to watch out for, in discourse as much as in design. At the same time, such variance can't explain away all perceptible imbalances! E.g. one of the reasons the LFQW/martial-caster discrepancy keeps coming up as a point in discussion is that it is rather more than merely "caster players engage with the game more". (Or say rather that if they <em>do</em> engage with the game more, it is because they have more mechanical points of engagement with gameplay as a result of the mechanical imbalance.)</p><p></p><p><strong>Edit to add:</strong> The above, I have to acknowledge, didn't really speak to the idea of symmetric vs. asymmetric balance discussed in the OP. I do think that balance as a whole is not dependent on being either kind of balance, though I daresay that asymmetric balance, while harder to achieve, "looks"/"feels" better in play. For instance, ideally, in a MOBA game, supposing you have two players playing different support classes/heroes, they will be about equally effective in supporting their squad as a whole while doing so using sufficiently distinct mechanics that it feels different to play one versus the other.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Composer99, post: 9170959, member: 7030042"] I am inclined to say that a team-based roleplaying game is balanced when any set of player characters [B](a)[/B] built and played by players with roughly equal skill and engagement [B](b)[/B] will contribute to the success of their group (the achievement of each characters' individual goals and/or the goals of the group as a whole) with about equal effectiveness [B](c)[/B] across all modes of gameplay deemed to be core to the system ([B]d)[/B] when viewed over the course of multiple sessions of gameplay. Suffice to say there is room for a lot of variance: (1) Players may not be of equal skill. Players who are better at working the mechanics of character-building, or who have a better grasp of applying their know-how to the goings-on in the in-game fiction will contribute to a greater extent - to my mind, regardless of the design effort made to ensure a baseline level of balance. (In TSR-era D&D, with less opportunity for character-building optimisation, discrepancies might be more likely to arise from the way ability scores shook out - there's rather a large difference in melee combat effectiveness between a fighter with 17 Strength versus a fighter with 18/90+ Strength!) (2) Players may not engage with the game in equal measure. Looking at D&D, some players might not care about non-combat aspects of play; others might enjoy combat and social interaction but not exploration, and so on. The more or less engaged a player is with a particular expected mode of gameplay, the more or less their character will contribute during gameplay, again, to my mind, regardless of the design effort made towards balance. (3) Apropos of "core modes of gameplay", in D&D 5e I am thinking of the idea of the three pillars of play: ideally, each player character should be able to contribute about equally to each pillar of gameplay, if that's what their players want. But it's probably not a concern if the balance of the game falls out of whack in "non-core" modes of play, such as downtime. (4) Naturally, some characters will find they are contributing more to a group's success in certain game sessions than in others. The fact of such variance doesn't mean balance as I discern it is not worth designing for, of course. It's just something to watch out for, in discourse as much as in design. At the same time, such variance can't explain away all perceptible imbalances! E.g. one of the reasons the LFQW/martial-caster discrepancy keeps coming up as a point in discussion is that it is rather more than merely "caster players engage with the game more". (Or say rather that if they [I]do[/I] engage with the game more, it is because they have more mechanical points of engagement with gameplay as a result of the mechanical imbalance.) [B]Edit to add:[/B] The above, I have to acknowledge, didn't really speak to the idea of symmetric vs. asymmetric balance discussed in the OP. I do think that balance as a whole is not dependent on being either kind of balance, though I daresay that asymmetric balance, while harder to achieve, "looks"/"feels" better in play. For instance, ideally, in a MOBA game, supposing you have two players playing different support classes/heroes, they will be about equally effective in supporting their squad as a whole while doing so using sufficiently distinct mechanics that it feels different to play one versus the other. [/QUOTE]
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