What do you do without balance?

[Crothian]

What do we do without balance?

Have fun!

 

[billd91]

The issue I've always had with "balance over time", or "face time" balance is that if spotlight time is important to you, then it limits the activities and classes people can play.

For example, you have one character in a party of four who is focused on say, thieving and sucks at all else. In order to share spotlight time equitably you need to ensure that 1/4 of your time is spent on theiving focused activities. Unless you are an excellent DM then this may well limit the situations that the party can be put in.

Or for "balance over time", what if the Fighter is killed at level 8 (or whereever you think casters start pulling ahead) and the player wants to start a wizard? Or even worse, the Wizard gets killed at level 8 and wants to play a fighter?

Balancing at the level of the session or encounter avoids these problems.

Face time also involves driving plots or being the focus of adventure hooks that then drive adventures. So it's not all about the mechanics and puting them into operation. Face time balance is broader than that and that's one reason I prefer it to encounter-level, mechanical balance. And I've found that works pretty well for my players. If they're not as effective in a few encounter situations but they've been more effective at driving the plot action in turn, they've been pretty satisfied from a balance perspective.

Sometimes calling the shot is as satisfying as taking the shot.

 

[The Ghost]

I'm not 100% sure people think that. People say it, but if they really mean it that would mean that there are people out there who not only like playing a character that they know for a fact isn't very good,
[*] but that they appreciate their character's failings and growing obsolescence over time.

See, I disagree, I know there are people who do just that. It is not an issue of desire in as much as it is an issue of acceptance. I am willing to accept that my fighter is more powerful than a wizard today and will slowly become less powerful over time. I think part of it comes down to campaign style, sure, or role-playing issues, but part of it also comes down to just how big that disparity is between the classes. This will vary from group to group depending on what the focus of their game is, and how much optimization occurs within that group.

I argue that a group that is less focused on combat is more likely to accept balance over time. I would also argue that if a group is more focused on optimization is less likely to accept balance over time.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

That's isn't achievable unless the classes are mechanically identical, which means only one class.

My definition is meant to include all option choices, not just class choice.

A better definition is, "no class is such a 'super class' that it obviates the need for classes outside its category (ie: MU, Divine, Warrior, Rogue).

And that's part of what I mean: no option presented when compared to a similar option, i.e. an option that is supposed to perform the same or nearly the same function, should be a better or worse choice. When presented with two classes whose fucntion is tank frontline fighters one of them shouldn't be better at that than the other.

I can't really accept your definition of balance, so I'll answer relative to my own notion of balance, which is pretty simple: everyone at the table must feel effective.

Wouldn't making sure that their options aren't subject to unclear bad choices help support that?

What do we do without balance?

Have fun!

How? Can you elaborate? I don't understand what information is supposed to be conveyed by this response.

 

[Crothian]

How? Can you elaborate? I don't understand what information is supposed to be conveyed by this response.

I game with my friends and we don't hog the spot light from each other and we help everyone be in the game. We don't need of the game to balance things for us by limiting characters that should not be limited. We have fun with the Jedi being a real Jedi and the force being the ultimate power in the universe. Players enjoy their characters and not for the power the character does or does not have. Or GM's make story hooks for each character so everyone is involved and has a chance to shine.

In the 90's I cut my teeth on games like Rifts that do not have balance between characters. My friends and I have fun together and rarely does the game matter.

 

[Kask]

My definition is meant to include all option choices, not just class choice.

That's not possible.

You can do it from the class side by tweaking 3.5 rules.

 

[Mournblade94]

Also, 7 years of hardcore MMORPG-playing has caused me to see balance as much more important than it really should be. Messageboards such as ENworld too. Actually, we talked about this last week (in my group), and the main concensus was that the internet (and especially boards like these) were probably the best and the worst thing that happened to our D&D.

I certainly agree with the previous poster who suggests that the net in general, and online multiplayer gaming in particular, might have made some of us hyper-sensitive to balance issues which may not, in the grand scheme of things, matter to many players. It most assuredly applies to me.

I do however think that balanced mechanics (classes, powers, talents, whatever they're called) are hallmarks of good overall design sensibilities, and I doubt there are many professional designers out there who would deliberately write imbalance into a game out of some perceived obligation to the source material, or in the expectation that their player base "would probably be okay with it". I just think the world has moved on from there.

This more than anything else is the contribution that video games have brought to the game table.

MMO's due to their nature absolutely have to be balanced. If people think that playing a class in an mmo is not fun, that MMO is going to suffer.

I played City of Heroes for a bit, especially around 'issue 5' when they nerfed some classes and buffed classes for balance. It was needed then. The classes needed to be balanced.

In a wargame the armies need to be balanced, or at least be balanced overall. CHoosing points is another matter.

In an RPG, There are many other factours to consider rather than combat. Though Mage is arguably the most powerful class, I rarely had a mage player that was leader of the party. It was usually the Fighter, or some subclass of fighter (yes even in 3rd edition) that took on the role of party leader (party leader, not leader as defined in 4e and mmo's).

I have never run a game yet where a rogue or warrior felt bored. Balance only became necessary when people got used to "team games" like City of heroes or World of Warcraft. Perhaps you are correct in that "the world has moved on". I would agree but that it is an effect of MMO's. The fact you are practically required to play on a team on an mmo is what turns me off to them incidentally, they should allow for solo play but that is another topic.

Video games that are not MMO's do not necessarily need balance. Oblivion Warriors suffer the same drawback that D&D warriors suffer. In Mass Effect a tech character is far less effective than a soldier. These video games however provide oppurtunity or "Face Balance" as I think cadfan coined. There are plenty of things you cannot do in mass effect if you do not have a techie, and likewise many places you cannot go in oblivion or morrowwind if you do not have a thief.

For me, balance in a game ensures that there are no (or few) truly suboptimal choices. In a balanced game, I will contribute and feel useful playing any reasonable type of adventuring character. I will not be penalized (with a less effective character) based on that decision.

For games that rely heavily on their mechanical aspects (like D&D, vis a vis combat abilities), I find balance is pretty darn important. If my character sucks, I will have less fun than the player whose character is really effective.

Other than the internet, I have never heard of a player not having fun because of class choice. I have heard of it in cases where the DM forced a class upon them. I know in my group nobody ever wanted to play cleric. I made my game extremely faith oriented, so when I DM a game it is less of a problem with them. The fighting classes just about everyone wanted. Perhaps thats anamolous.

I would definitely NOT have fun playing a sucky class. I do not think though, that the balance of D&D as it was really made non casters all that bad.

The only balance I ever strived for in D&D was making sure that my encounters were challenging to the PCs. I managed to make some perfect encounters where about half the party is down and the ones left standing have less than 5% of their hit points left. That is balance as I see it.

 

[Voadam]

In the 90's I cut my teeth on games like Rifts that do not have balance between characters. My friends and I have fun together and rarely does the game matter.

Did you play things like the scavenger pack rats and academician classes next to glitter boys, Juicers, dragons, and Technowizards?

We played a bunch of Rifts too but the power discrepancies were significant enough and our game so combat centric that the weaker half of the classes never got played, it was all about the megadamage. There were enough strong classes that we had varied parties and had fun with it but it was unfortunate to know a bunch of interesting PC concepts would be hugely overshadowed and feel useless every time a DB showed up.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Other than the internet, I have never heard of a player not having fun because of class choice.

I have had times when my character was not a lot of fun to play because anything he could do could be done better by someone else. I've seen other players suffer that as well.

I have also faced the non-fun conundrum of seeing an option that looked interesting, but knowing that the character would be less effective than those of my friends if I went that route.

(To be clear, mechanical effectiveness isn't always a big deal. Some character concepts--and some entire games--are fun for reasons other than how mechanically effective you are. But when effectiveness is part of the fun--as it usually is in D&D--a reasonable degree of balance does affect the enjoyment of the game. . . .)

 

[Crothian]

Did you play things like the scavenger pack rats and academician classes next to glitter boys, Juicers, dragons, and Technowizards?

Yes, it would have been pointless for this discussion if we didn't have Cosmo Knights in the same group that we had Rogue Scholars.

We played a bunch of Rifts too but the power discrepancies were significant enough and our game so combat centric

And that's the key. I ran the game for all the players so I never focused on combat that much.