What do you do without balance?

[thedungeondelver]

Pah, balance. Balance is the thief not failing his save v. death roll while trying to walk on that rickety board spanning the 60' deep pit filled with poison spikes (ten total, roll 1d10 if the thief falls, each spike does 1-6 points of damage and a save v. poison required, or die).



IOW it's what I say it is.

 

[Ariosto]

I've seen one 4E Bard, and he (pardon) "totally pwned" skill challenges.

Also, what the Dungeon Delver said.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I disagree. The reason I stopped playing RIFTS was exactly because of the balance issues. I attempted to run a number of games and they all fell apart the same way:

"The enemy hits you with a long ranged missile. It explodes and catches...looks like the whole party. It does 70 MDC. That kills the Vagabond and the Street Rat who aren't wearing armor immediately. You are vaporized. The Coalition Soldier is wearing...50 MDC armor. I guess that vaporized you too. As for the Glitterboy and the Megajuicer. Well, you take 70 MDC damage from your 700."

Then everyone got frustrated at having to role up new characters. I got annoyed at having to come up with entirely new plots that involved the new characters.

Thus, I started having to carefully screen the characters that people played in my games in order to maintain the balance. Unfortunately, that takes a LOT of work. Especially with the power gamers I had in my group. I'd spend most of my week answering phone calls from a friend of mine who would call me up and say, "Can I be a Rahu-man with custom crafted Glitterboy armor with 4 arms?" 3 times a week. Only to say no each and every time. Then he'd come back with some other stupidly powerful character and I'd have to say no yet again.

I realized it was easier just to run 3.5e D&D, which wasn't completely balanced, but was WAY closer than RIFTS.

Obviously experiences will differ, but the fact that you didn't have fun in the gloriously unbalanced RIFTS doesn't invalidate the experiences of others who DID.

Heck, I've even had fun running HERO campaigns set in a RIFTS world. IOW, players picked their OCC/RCCs and then got told how many build points they'd have. You know what? It still worked- people still had fun.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I don't agree that they traded Spotlight Balance so much as reduced it's dependency upon the DM (conceptually redefining Spotlight Balance, if you will). The spotlight is more present in 4E (combat) than ever before due to the role system.

But that's not spotlight balance. The spotlight is pointed at combat and everybody is standing in it. You're looking at pretty much a definitional example of concept balance.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Obviously experiences will differ, but the fact that you didn't have fun in the gloriously unbalanced RIFTS doesn't invalidate the experiences of others who DID.

It doesn't invalidate them. However, I'd like to see these games in action. We tried running a good 5 or 6 RIFTS campaigns and after having problems with all of them, we gave up entirely. I still love the RIFTS universe, but since I started playing it I've had the same recommendation to anyone running the game, "RIFTS works well if you use another system that is more balanced in order to play in the RIFTS world. Either that or you specifically restrict your players to a narrow band of RCC/OCCs. Like: You can all be humans or SDC creatures only and you can take armor, weapons, and OCCs from Mercenaries and the Main Rule Book only." Then you can have a pretty fun game because everyone is on the same level.

My guess is that the reason these unbalanced games work is because the players are put into situations where their powers don't matter at all. If the game revolves around interpersonal relationships(like the one really successful RIFTS game I've heard about did) then it doesn't matter if one player is a dragon and the other a street rat. It only matters whether one or the other can win the love of the woman they both care about.

If the challenges you face end up making most of your powers useless, then it creates a sort of balance. But people still want at least a semblance of balance.

The RIFTS game I was referring to was run by a friend of mine that I didn't play in. However, we had a conversation about RIFTS and I told him it was broken and he said he didn't see that at all. His game had worked fine. I asked him how he did it considering all my games had ended so badly. He basically told me that it was about the characters and the interactions between them. I asked how his party worked when they fought a real enemy, like say they needed to fight a bunch of SAMAS suits of armor who can fly, are fast, and have long ranged weapons. He basically told me that he'd never use that as an enemy because it would completely destroy some of the characters. The couple of times he's ran a battle at all, the combat characters have participated while everyone else hid. He purposefully didn't fire at any of the weak characters. But a couple of his players hated combats, so there had been about 3 or 4 combats in multiple years of running his game.

Sure, in cases like that, where you aren't even using the rules, the imbalances in the rules don't matter.

 

[jdrakeh]

Balance isn't a big deal in any game that I play, so long as no one charcter outclasses all of the others on such a prolific level that said other characters may as well not exist. FWIW, the only game/system I've ever had that problem in was Palladium/Rifts.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But I will also say this about your point. I think it is the job of the DM in designing adventures or scenarios to give his "Green Arrow players" opportunities to do far more than just wisecrack and dodge. If I were Green Arrow I'd want an opportunity to exploit my real capabilities, both in a fight and outside of one.

It just isn't always possible. If you are fighting a city sized creature that is immune to a nuclear blast, impervious to mind control, and generally super powerful....well, you are going to want to be Superman or Wonder Woman to beat it. The Green Arrow can use his guile all he wants, but it just isn't going to be useful. His ability to shoot arrows is next to useless.

In the comics, you can do this, because you can cut from a scene of Superman beating up on the monster to a scene of The Green Arrow in a back alley talking to some thugs in order to track down the villain who created the monster. You can easily run 2 stories at once, or even just not have the Green Arrow show up for the battle or have him hide for the whole battle. The Green Arrow won't care, he's just a character that you are writing for. On the other hand, in a game setting you have players who are playing the characters. Most of them have feelings that are hurt whenever they feel they are being completely upstaged, when they feel useless or when you ignore them for long periods of time to focus on other people.

There gets to be a point where the power difference between the highest and the lowers of the group is so great that even when given a chance to "exploit your real capabilities" that you still can't do anything useful.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

But I will also say this about your point. I think it is the job of the DM in designing adventures or scenarios to give his "Green Arrow players" opportunities to do far more than just wisecrack and dodge. If I were Green Arrow I'd want an opportunity to exploit my real capabilities, both in a fight and outside of one.

But isn't catering to a character's abilities basically eliminating any need for the player to bother playing, or even building, their character effectively because they know they'll be catered to no matter what? What use then are the rules?

 

[Starbuck_II]

It just isn't always possible. If you are fighting a city sized creature that is immune to a nuclear blast, impervious to mind control, and generally super powerful....well, you are going to want to be Superman or Wonder Woman to beat it. The Green Arrow can use his guile all he wants, but it just isn't going to be useful. His ability to shoot arrows is next to useless.

Dude, arrows are Green Arrows utility belt. He has an arrow for every occasion.

Hmm, he can't be hurt, but what he can't see will hurt him. Smoke arrows (they explode on impact in a puff of smoke blocking vision).

Big bad can't see what WW or SM are doing to him now.

Usually, though there are minions he can fight though.

Like they handle monsters he stops the aliens from taking over.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It doesn't invalidate them. However, I'd like to see these games in action. We tried running a good 5 or 6 RIFTS campaigns and after having problems with all of them, we gave up entirely. I still love the RIFTS universe, but since I started playing it I've had the same recommendation to anyone running the game, "RIFTS works well if you use another system that is more balanced in order to play in the RIFTS world. Either that or you specifically restrict your players to a narrow band of RCC/OCCs. Like: You can all be humans or SDC creatures only and you can take armor, weapons, and OCCs from Mercenaries and the Main Rule Book only." Then you can have a pretty fun game because everyone is on the same level.

My guess is that the reason these unbalanced games work is because the players are put into situations where their powers don't matter at all. If the game revolves around interpersonal relationships(like the one really successful RIFTS game I've heard about did) then it doesn't matter if one player is a dragon and the other a street rat. It only matters whether one or the other can win the love of the woman they both care about.

Well, I have run or participated in 4 RIFTS campaigns that lasted at least 9 months of weekly sessions.

The 2 I ran, I used all of the sourcebooks at my disposal, plus Heroes Unlimited and other Palladium sources that worked with the Conversion manual. I did excise a couple of OCCs and RCCS- mostly because of redundancy, plus confusing or truly awful mechanics. Nothing was excised due to power discrepancy.

My players chose things from Atlantis, the Basic book, Britain and a few others. Some were inherently MDC PCs, some had MDC armor, and some didn't start off in either condition.

When it came to combat, I used standard modern mixed-force tactics. Sure a tank can directly attack infantry, but it makes more sense for a tank to concentrate fire on the opposing armor units before they take it out, and leave the infantry to engage infantry...until one side is overmatched. THEN infantry can start attacking armor directly, or armor can afford to target infantry as a primary target.

Translated to RIFTS, that means the SAMAS guys are going after the obvious threats first- the Glitterboy, the captured and converted SAMAS, the 15' tall guy who is taking on the "Walkers" by himself... The little guys had to deal with small arms fire and AP rounds, but were rarely directly targeted by things like Boom Guns...until they proved to be a threat worth targeting with one.

And little guys learned not to stand next to the big, shiny, "lightning rod" of the PC whom everyone knew was going to get lit up.

I didn't use over-the-horizon missiles or anything like that...not unless the PCs had some kind of resource that meant that they 1) warranted such targeting and 2) had some kind of potential defense.

But combat happened...at least 1 every other session.