Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8677803" data-attributes="member: 19857">(I can't believe I'm going to defend Palladium or Kevin Seimbieda's game design choices here...)The thing about Palladium's games is that they come from a particular era of RPGs where "balance" was a thing that was still being felt out.  In the D&D/AD&D sphere there was a lot of talk about balance and a lot of things that were put into place and held there because of "game balance" (like racial class/level limits, wizards not wearing armor or using swords, etc.) and everyone who played for a while knew that those nods towards balance were kind of bunk and didn't actually balance much of anything. But while there were some folks who were highly concerned about the game providing mechanical balance between characters (and they'd go on to create games like Rolemaster, GURPS, Chaosium's BRP system, etc.) there were also other folks who saw the idea of mechanical balance as not a goal worth trying to pursue at the rules level and that balance was only a thing that individual GMs could manage at their own tables by setting up the game for the characters the players had created.Palladium's games are firmly in that latter camp.  There's no concern with mechanical balance - it's up to individual GMs to figure it out.  In some ways its actually kind of liberating because you know there's no magic formula that you can use to create a "fair" encounter, so nobody should be expecting encounters to have some kind of fairness about them - every encounter could potentially be a cakewalk or something you need to run away from and even an experienced GM might very well not know which kind it is until a few rounds into the combat, so be prepared for anything (Now, it would be nice to have that spelled out in the actual rulebooks and maybe some advice on how to actually do that kind of thing for new GMs. Especially since we live in an era where every game designer worries about mechanical balance and at least tries to create systems that work towards it, so the further we get from the original Palladium publication date the less experience anyone has with the idea that a game shouldn't care about mechanical balance.)</blockquote>

Verification