D&D 5E Why Balance is Bad

[Warbringer]

"Next verse, same as the first" ..

All I care about is my players have fun, and that means long term that means they get to contribute to the game.

If they feel left out, we include; if a mechanic doesn't work, we exclude.

In other words, we ensure balance at the table.

 

[n00bdragon]

Nice to see mods ignoring the inflammatory posts and dog piling on the reactions and appeals to neutrality.

This entire topic is edition warring at its finest, but its no secret that certain types of edition warring are more acceptable than others.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Balance is like money.

Having it isn't everything; not having it is.

It's also like money in that it doesn't bring happiness.

 

[mlund]

While Symmetry will give you Balance, not everything that is Balanced is Symmetrical.

Most people don't object to Balance in a game. Sure, you'll always have someone here or there that wants to role-play "this guy is the best because [Insert Feature Here]" and might try to justify it as an appeal to Tradition or Genre or Simulation or whatever, but for the most part having a game that doesn't have built-in uber-classes is relatively inoffensive to most, and a deal-breaker for some.

Does that mean everyone needs the same maximum DPS or equivalent threat-removal? Not really.

Does that mean team-based-game ecology will hold together if a couple of classes can completely subvert game economies that rule all the other classes? Probably not.

- Marty Lund

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'll go ahead and post my thoughts here, since the other thread blew up to quickly.

In my view, on balance balance is desirable provided it itself is balanced.

Fundamentally, balance isn't a game problem; it's a people problem. With the right group, you can play the world's most unbalanced game -- Rifts, for example -- and any balance or lack thereof built into the game system simply would not matter, because the group could handle it.

On the other hand, it just takes one player who has different expectations than the rest of the group, an an imbalance will just break the group. I'll give two examples. I DM'd a campaign where I had to restrict access to certain materials for the whole group because I had one player who I knew would abuse that material. Talking about it with him didn't stop the behavior; he just had different expectations (and it wasn't the sort of thing you'd lick a friend out of the group for) -- so we worked around the problem by imposing balance on the game system. I was a player in a different group where one of our players would use charop board suggestions to design his characters, where everyone else was focused more on fun and less on optimization. It became a significant problem by the time we'd advanced into mid levels, and the DM ended up having to take drastic action.

In neither of those examples is the issue fundamentally a game design issue. However, better game design could have reduced the pain. Good game design should try to minimize the amount of judgment the GM must impose in balancing the game -- the game should not require absolute rules mastery to manipulate it so that it works for your group. So I'm a fan of game designs that build in some relative balance, and do so in a way that works out in play -- no balancing via flavor elements or metagame concepts like XP. But no game should go so overboard in pursuit of balance that the playability and pursuit of fun is lost. Not everything in a game should be equal, but it should be fair to all players. Reasonable balance is the goal, not perfect balance.

So balance, in the end, must be balanced with all of the other elements of game play ... but it should be present in some amount.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Balance is good.

That part many miss is:

There are dozens of ways to balance a game. There is not only one type of balance.

The hard part is picking a type of balance, doing it right, explaining it, and selling it.
It's hard to do that. Almost every RPG and edition of a RPG fails at one of the above.

Balance is not the most important thing. But it is high on the list as failure to pick one, do it right, and/or sell it spawns easy competition.

There is truth to this. Balance as a concept needs to be considered for any game. Some games can be more playable than others without very much of it.

I'll go ahead and post my thoughts here, since the other thread blew up to quickly.

In my view, on balance balance is desirable provided it itself is balanced.

Fundamentally, balance isn't a game problem; it's a people problem. With the right group, you can play the world's most unbalanced game -- Rifts, for example -- and any balance or lack thereof built into the game system simply would not matter, because the group could handle it.

On the other hand, it just takes one player who has different expectations than the rest of the group, an an imbalance will just break the group. I'll give two examples. I DM'd a campaign where I had to restrict access to certain materials for the whole group because I had one player who I knew would abuse that material. Talking about it with him didn't stop the behavior; he just had different expectations (and it wasn't the sort of thing you'd lick a friend out of the group for) -- so we worked around the problem by imposing balance on the game system. I was a player in a different group where one of our players would use charop board suggestions to design his characters, where everyone else was focused more on fun and less on optimization. It became a significant problem by the time we'd advanced into mid levels, and the DM ended up having to take drastic action.

In neither of those examples is the issue fundamentally a game design issue. However, better game design could have reduced the pain. Good game design should try to minimize the amount of judgment the GM must impose in balancing the game -- the game should not require absolute rules mastery to manipulate it so that it works for your group. So I'm a fan of game designs that build in some relative balance, and do so in a way that works out in play -- no balancing via flavor elements or metagame concepts like XP. But no game should go so overboard in pursuit of balance that the playability and pursuit of fun is lost. Not everything in a game should be equal, but it should be fair to all players. Reasonable balance is the goal, not perfect balance.

So balance, in the end, must be balanced with all of the other elements of game play ... but it should be present in some amount.

Good stuff. I don't agree completely on the XP thing. Requiring more XP for a class that is somewhat more powerful is one decent solution.

 

[ImperatorK]

It's also like money in that it doesn't bring happiness.

Maybe you like being poor. Most people don't.

 

[Lindeloef]

[...]
I DM'd a campaign where I had to restrict access to certain materials for the whole group because I had one player who I knew would abuse that material. Talking about it with him didn't stop the behavior; he just had different expectations (and it wasn't the sort of thing you'd lick a friend out of the group for) -- so we worked around the problem by imposing balance on the game system.

.

I know its just a typo, but the image is just too hilarious ^^

"John, you are disrupting our groups gaming style, so we have to ask you to leave.... Commence the licking!"

 

[Herobizkit]

It's interesting from my POV that the whole concept of "balance" was never an issue pre 3e. There was "what players found fun" versus "what the DM found fun" and it always seemed to work.

Then 3e came along and wanted all rules to apply equally to monsters and PCs. A noble venture. But ultimately the math became cumbersome and the extraneous information became too much.

Then the pendulum swung in the opposite direction (4e) making all players equal to all players to the point where many would complain of homogenization and that "every character is essentially the same". I don't disagree... for me, mages got the shaft and don't seem at all "mage-y" like before.

And now, with summer coming and my having read a few of the playtest variations, it looks like the WotC gang are trying to 'split the difference' and create a 3e "lite" game featuring some 4e tactial elements and character options.

I've played horribly unbalanced games before (Palladium, fr'ex) and horribly unbalanced characters (GURPS, fr'ex), yet still found both to be incredibly fun and everyone playing having fun despite these 'glaring' imbalances...

And fun really is the whole point, isn't it?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I know its just a typo, but the image is just too hilarious ^^

"John, you are disrupting our groups gaming style, so we have to ask you to leave.... Commence the licking!"

LOL *snort*

What goes on in D&D group stays in D&D group.

It's interesting from my POV that the whole concept of "balance" was never an issue pre 3e. There was "what players found fun" versus "what the DM found fun" and it always seemed to work.

It was an issue -- *cough* CompleteBookofElves *cough* -- there was just no convenient interweb to use to gripe about it.