AngeltheTechrat
First Post
But is that because the wheels are glued in place and they can't even spin? The bike isn't much used to someone that way either. Just "safer" perhapse.
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The Problem of Balance (and how to get rid of it)
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
But is that because the wheels are glued in place and they can't even spin? The bike isn't much used to someone that way either. Just "safer" perhapse.
AngeltheTechrat
First Post
Yes. It would help a great deal if flavor was not always so hardwired in with particular mechanics.
My examples were also ment to show I wasn't trying to be "superman" either.
As for making choices and being less powerful for them, that's one thing. But there seems to be a kind of drop-off formed. Where it doesn't matter if you're only a little underpowered or a lot underpowered, you're still in the pit, because the enemies/encounters "balanced" against your party's "level" don't give you any leway to be even slightly weaker.
In 3E, for instance, this force most characters to wear a ton of flavorless magical bling, and carry around a golf-bag of special material weapons. (The aformentioned bard wore Silver, Cold Iron, and Jade Ribbon Daggers in her hair, for instance.)
Hussar
Legend
Imaro - I don't know about anyone else, but the reason I'm talking about balance as a guiding principle of game design is because the OP's questions were pretty much answered on the first page. How do you get rid of balance? That's bloody easy. Heck, I've answered it myself a couple of times as well - different point buys, variant rules, change the xp needs, add levels, add templates - and I'm sure there are many, many more.
More interesting to me at least, is the idea of why you would want to do this as a baseline in a game. As has been mentioned upthread, it is much, much easier to imbalance a balanced game than go the other way. Thirty years of RPG design pretty much shows that balance is a holy grail in most games. That, while you may have imbalance between the characters overall, by and large, every character is viable in play. If you go too far in imbalance, you wind up with BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner.
Sure, I can see that there are a number of ways balance can be achieved. You can do it at the front end with character generation and pretty much hard wire it into the classes, or you can do it on the back end and have the DM create scenarios that speak to the imbalances. Both approaches work. I do agree with you on that.
I just think that the second approach is very lazy game design.
True there is variablity. And that's where V&V fails by and large. Some random generations were just SO much better than others that it wasn't Superman adventuring with Batman, it was Superman adventuring with Jimmy Olsen.
Yup. There was traps there. And they took all of what? 30 seconds to disarm? The thief rolls his find/remove traps and away they go. A far cry from the idea that the game was focused on those things.
Really? You really have players regularly regailing each other of tales of how they walked down a hallway?
That's one view. My view is that you wind up with either two results - first, everyone cheats and their characters have no low scores and everything is above 10 at the very least and at least one 18. Second, you wind up with one character that is just so far ahead of everyone else that you again wind up with the guy completely overshadowing the other guy.
Forex, one fighter (1e or 2e) has percentile strength and the other has a 15 strength. There's just no comparison. The second fighter is averaging well less than half as much damage than the other. A few levels of that and there's more than a few players falling on their own swords.
More interesting to me at least, is the idea of why you would want to do this as a baseline in a game. As has been mentioned upthread, it is much, much easier to imbalance a balanced game than go the other way. Thirty years of RPG design pretty much shows that balance is a holy grail in most games. That, while you may have imbalance between the characters overall, by and large, every character is viable in play. If you go too far in imbalance, you wind up with BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner.
Sure, I can see that there are a number of ways balance can be achieved. You can do it at the front end with character generation and pretty much hard wire it into the classes, or you can do it on the back end and have the DM create scenarios that speak to the imbalances. Both approaches work. I do agree with you on that.
I just think that the second approach is very lazy game design.
True there is variablity. And that's where V&V fails by and large. Some random generations were just SO much better than others that it wasn't Superman adventuring with Batman, it was Superman adventuring with Jimmy Olsen.
Yup. There was traps there. And they took all of what? 30 seconds to disarm? The thief rolls his find/remove traps and away they go. A far cry from the idea that the game was focused on those things.
Really? You really have players regularly regailing each other of tales of how they walked down a hallway?
That's one view. My view is that you wind up with either two results - first, everyone cheats and their characters have no low scores and everything is above 10 at the very least and at least one 18. Second, you wind up with one character that is just so far ahead of everyone else that you again wind up with the guy completely overshadowing the other guy.
Forex, one fighter (1e or 2e) has percentile strength and the other has a 15 strength. There's just no comparison. The second fighter is averaging well less than half as much damage than the other. A few levels of that and there's more than a few players falling on their own swords.
AngeltheTechrat
First Post
I don't think the original poster ment to get rid of balance. I think they ment to get rid of the problem created by balance.
No, the OP was quite clear:
"To put it another way, how could you take "game balance"--in terms of classes and races--out of 4E, but still keep it D&D, and still make it enjoyable and playable?"
Removing balance as a governing principle was an explicit goal stated in the original post.
LostSoul
Adventurer
Balance is important because it forces a player to make a decision: should I choose this action or this other one?
I believe that the fun of an RPG comes from the choices a player makes and the consequences of those choices.
What kind of choices you want the player to make - what kind of choices you want your game to be about - those are the ones you want to balance. It can be deciding between spending your limited resources (actions) to attack a monster or heal up. It can be about the choice to do what's "right" in the world, emulating the source material in the right way or doing what your PC would do in this world. Or any other number of meaningful choices.
In order to give those choices meaning, they have to be valid choices. The player has to make a decision. What do I want right now? If one choice is clearly superior, then there isn't any decision to be made - no player input. But if different choices are valid - if they are balanced against each other - then the player must make a decision and live with it.
That's why balance is important.
I believe that the fun of an RPG comes from the choices a player makes and the consequences of those choices.
What kind of choices you want the player to make - what kind of choices you want your game to be about - those are the ones you want to balance. It can be deciding between spending your limited resources (actions) to attack a monster or heal up. It can be about the choice to do what's "right" in the world, emulating the source material in the right way or doing what your PC would do in this world. Or any other number of meaningful choices.
In order to give those choices meaning, they have to be valid choices. The player has to make a decision. What do I want right now? If one choice is clearly superior, then there isn't any decision to be made - no player input. But if different choices are valid - if they are balanced against each other - then the player must make a decision and live with it.
That's why balance is important.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Something I've found over the long run is that short-term imbalances have a way of evening themselves out as time goes on.
I can think of numerous occasions when, for example, one character in a given party was way more powerful (in some way(s) or other) than the rest; yet a few adventures down the road, he was dead and the party carried on.
Sometimes it grows out of the actual game play. Over-the-top example: let's assume we start out with a party of 6 Fighters, all with exactly equal stats, equipment, etc., and send them into the field. Two die; their gear is split up among the other 4, along with the first adventure's treasury. Then replacements for the two dead guys come in, with (to be fair) the same starting gear as the first lot. Next adventure, the party splits in half for a while; one lot defeat something big and gain lots of ExP, while the others get lost in a maze and miss the excitement. So now you've got 4 different gradations within the party:
2 have extra gear and extra ExP
1 has extra gear but less ExP
1 has less gear but extra ExP
2 have less gear and less ExP
Now, spin this out over 6 adventures (meaning 6 treasury divisions) and several levels (maybe including some lost levels) and yes indeed, imbalance is rearing its ugly head, folks!
In the right party (i.e. a non-greedy one; a very rare thing) the gear inequalities can solve themselves, but the level inequalities can't be solved without introducing what is - to me - a much greater threat: the character who earns ExP by Doing Nothing.
Imbalance is a fact of life, no matter what the system does.
Lanefan
I can think of numerous occasions when, for example, one character in a given party was way more powerful (in some way(s) or other) than the rest; yet a few adventures down the road, he was dead and the party carried on.
Sometimes it grows out of the actual game play. Over-the-top example: let's assume we start out with a party of 6 Fighters, all with exactly equal stats, equipment, etc., and send them into the field. Two die; their gear is split up among the other 4, along with the first adventure's treasury. Then replacements for the two dead guys come in, with (to be fair) the same starting gear as the first lot. Next adventure, the party splits in half for a while; one lot defeat something big and gain lots of ExP, while the others get lost in a maze and miss the excitement. So now you've got 4 different gradations within the party:
2 have extra gear and extra ExP
1 has extra gear but less ExP
1 has less gear but extra ExP
2 have less gear and less ExP
Now, spin this out over 6 adventures (meaning 6 treasury divisions) and several levels (maybe including some lost levels) and yes indeed, imbalance is rearing its ugly head, folks!
In the right party (i.e. a non-greedy one; a very rare thing) the gear inequalities can solve themselves, but the level inequalities can't be solved without introducing what is - to me - a much greater threat: the character who earns ExP by Doing Nothing.
Imbalance is a fact of life, no matter what the system does.
Lanefan
Hussar
Legend
Oh, now here I would totally agree. We can never, ever make things perfectly balanced. Impossible goal. What we can, however, do, is mitigate obvious imbalances through mechanics. Make two weapons equal, for example, and the choice of one weapon or the other becomes a simple matter of taste (do I use a morningstar or a mace (3e)?)
Angelthetechrat said:
No, I don't believe so, and Umbran has already pointed out why. See, the thing is, if you want to talk about getting rid of the problems created by balance, first you have to define what those problems are. So far, very little of that has been done (although you took an interesting stab at it). In your own examples, the problems aren't one of balance though, IMO.
The problem is, you made choices that you knew were inferior, beyond mechanics, beyond anything else, you knew these choices were inferior, and then you complain that they don't work in the game. You chose roller skates for your character, knowing that in game issues would make them of very limited use. No amount of mechanical balance is going to help that.
It's like the wizard player who complains that he can't stand on the front line and swing a sword just like a fighter. Yes, he can certainly try, but, unless we make the wizard par with the fighter, he's just not going to be able to do it. So, yup, you could make the wizard just as good of a fighter as the fighter (1e elf f/mu anyone?), but then there's no point in taking a straight fighter. Why bother? It's deliberately choosing to gibble yourself to play a plain fighter when you have a clearly superior choice in front of you.
As was mentioned earlier, a balanced system does not prevent you from making less powerful characters. It does prevent you, OTOH, from making characters far MORE powerful than everyone around you. But, you can work around the balance by simply adding in goodies to make that character more powerful.
If that's what the group wants, go for it.
FireLance
Legend
Actually, given that the OP was quite happy with the idea of balancing a halfling's lack of raw combat ability with extra luck (see here and here), it seems to me that his problem was not with balance per se, but with the emphasis on balance in combat (as opposed to balancing combat ability with out-of-combat ability), or the flavor of balance (halflings should be balanced in a way that is thematically appropriate) or the way balance seemed to contsrain ideas (instead of coming up with an idea and then balancing it).
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