Oh yeah? Well your face is a myth.

Right?

Right?

First off, I loved reading this. Not only did it hit on a point I’ve argued several times, it is very entertaining. (and oddly erotic. Just me?) History lesson!

Once upon a time, in Florida far, far away, I was the manager of a gaming store. I stood there. I took (distressingly small amounts of)money from customers and put it in a registers. I talked games. I played Magic. I had very little self-esteem. During that time, I had a lot of arguments about game balance, primarily between the camps of hardcore AD&D gamers, waging their war over which edition was better (3rd was a long way off still, so it was the ’80s versus the ’90s primarily). When drawn into the argument, I always said this – is it more fun to be heroic or lame.

If a game is to be balanced, it needs to be balanced towards the realm of “more kick-ass” and “fucking awesome”. It’s hard to compete with video games for player attention -make it interactive and awesome, and they’ll keep coming back week after week.

100% spot on.

100% impossible to sell to the majority of people in the hobby.

A ‘balanced’ setting lacks the room for varied skills and the fact that a poor fighter with mad tactical skillz (same source) can defeat a muscle bound veteran if the conflict isn’t simple fisticuffs. Or that at the point of comparision – some characters may have just shagged thier way through the esceholons of power while another was busy locked in a monastery punching sand.

I disagree, to an extent. Balance is necessary in a game, to keep from any one player or character from completely toppling the apple cart and spilling Granny Smiths everywhere. If that happens, sure, you can pick them up, but you know they’re going to be damaged and you’re not going to find them all. Little Johnny just stole a bunch as they went rolling past, and the herd of sheep are coming this way faster than you can gather.

Okay, I’m not sure where I was going with that. Shut up, I’m still working on my first cup of coffee.

The thing is, you’re talking about perfect balance. And in that regard, I agree. Perfect balance is boring. Perfect balance is bland. Perfect balance is bromidic, even. At that point, you may as well just have one character option available, or hell, provide the completed sheet for them and tell them this is the only thing they can use.
No advancement, no gear picks, no tweaking or tinkering. Boom. This is it.

You need some nod to game balance. A rough, you-have-an-undefined-chance-of-success balance, that may shift depending on circumstance, environment and character specialties. If I make a social character who absolutely dominates debates and can roll anyone to their will, I certainly don’t expect him to waltz up to Black Trenchcoat Gunbunny Killmaster and kick his ass physically. And I don’t expect Been Hit One Too Many Times In The Cauliflower Ear to wipe the floor in the debating arena, if all he’s been doing his whole life is drinking beer and punching people for chump change.

And I also somewhat disagree with the statement that “the game is balanced if people are having fun”. I do get what you’re saying, but balance is pure mechanics. It’s more that “the game works so long as people are having fun”.

I have nothing of value to say other than I really need to canvas this town for players, damn it. It’s the posts like this that the game-lust too strong to bear.

I have been gifted with an awesome group at my table. It’s all about the story and we play systems like fit that. One of the players, my wife, is running Pathfinder which is way more “loot and kill”, but guess what? Two fights in the whole of our first level up. It was all about the story.

I’ve only ever played with someone who tried to make the game about unbalance. He tried to make a 3.5e character who was better than everyone else’s, as he was a moron and there are a finite number of skill points, he failed miserably and created several useless characters. In this case a “balanced” would have made it more fun, but so would shooting him, which was the avenue we pursued.

I’m glad only 4e seems to have build a system around trying to thwart one type of gamer. It seems silly to me to build a system to thwart them, when we could just not play with them anymore and keep game systems that are fun.

Game Balance isn’t a Myth….I’m a Myth!

*rimshot!*

Liked your post. I do have a question for you however: What about situations where one player clearly has an advantage with the build of their character and that is directly affecting the enjoyability of the game for others? What if the game is has rules for both combat and social interaction but is clearly weighted towards the combat?

Fuck. Is that even a word? Enjoyability, fun,rockawesomeness, etc.

My point is that I’ve seen games where people design their characters to be unstoppable and not just in DnD. An example I would use was in the Scion: Hero game I made a while back. I made a Scion of Loki that I enjoyed playing. Basing her off Inara from Firefly (I always loved her confidence and her wealth of knowledge which is what I used) I had taken the Shapeshifting Purview from the Ragnarok book. The party knew who I was but even they had no idea what my true race, gender, or name was other than I went by “Garnet.”

I went with a social based character with plenty of followers, some nifty Relics that allowed me to use Shapeshifting and Chaos, and went through the first two sessions being able to subtley manipulate our opponents and investigate crime scenes that put us on the trail of our nemesis, the Brotherhood. Then it went haywire.

For the next four sessions the game was pure hack and slash, with players literally attacking NPCs in the middle of the dialogue. The other players were more interested in laying waste to opponents with their powers and since they kept turning each session into one log combat scene, Garnet just wasn’t effective. The game seemed to favor combat over social interaction which angered and confused me as the game has such a rich backstory where divine figures from multiple religions interact on Earth.

Long rambling tangent aside, it’s an issue that I find aggravating. I want to play in these worlds but the combat mechanics seem to glorify combat itself and focus the game towards it.

Any thoughts?

@John

Is the problem not with the player(s), or possibly your “fit” with those players? They clearly wanted to play a combat game and you didn’t, not fun. Perhaps their characters were useless outside of combat.

What I am trying to say is, why possibly ruin a game system just to stop one type of player?

@John: Darren pretty much hit it. If one player’s “build” of a character is affecting the enjoyment of others, 95% of the time it’s not due to the mechanics but the player dynamic. Or, put a different way, I ran an entire chronicle in OWoD (not the most “balanced” of systems on the best of days) where one character was Kinfolk. That’s it. She could see spirits, but that was her only power(z). Everyone else was supernatural doubleplus: mages, shapeshifters, homebrewed-dragon-human-hybrid. And that chronicle was mega awesome, because the RP was so thick you could have spread it on toast.

Now, in a game where much of the game is bound up in a more quantifiable concept (like combat), yes, you want a system that makes characters that are more or less equally capable. Which is why it’s interesting to me that D&D, a game that is intrinsically about numbers over roleplaying (yes, we’ve all played D&D campaigns wherein we RP’d our faces off, but that’s in spite of the rules, I’d argue), does not.

Great post. How many times did we have the “My X can ass rape your Y any time” with my players. Most of the times it ended with me saying: “Well, I’m the GM… you die, I win.”

Seriously, game balance is something that must be aimed at but can never be obtained. I consider something balanced when one character is strong in one situation but not in the other and another character is weak in the first situation but strong in the second.

I disagree with your last line, as a game can be fun while not being balanced.

That being said, I do agree with the general thrust of your post. Removing all other factors in an encounter doesn’t show balance, because that situation is never going to happen and thus never needs to be accounted for.

Balance is still important, but it doesn’t have to be in the “kill kill kill” camp. A fighter and a diplomat can be perfectly balanced characters, one is just more geared for combat the other the social arena. The pen is mightier than the sword, sure, but try using a pen to ward off a fighter’s sword and see where that gets you.

I think the problem is people are ego-centric and in general just think short term. If Bob can kill Steve 9 times out of 10, Steve is going to think Bob is unbalanced even if the only reason Bob wins is because he is smart enough to play to his strengths while Steve isn’t.

I also agree with the comment that in RPGs you should balance to the side of bad assery. it lets everyone have more fun imo.

I will agree that game balance is a myth. But, game *IMBALANCE* is very, very real. It’s easy to point to games where something is seriously broken (and I don’t just mean “can be exploited by a munchkin,” I mean disrupts play and/or immersion when used as intended).

Game balance is a state of perfection that cannot actually exist. The closer you get to it, the more the definition becomes contradictory and self-defeating. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth striving for, though.

That definition of game balance is a sticking point, too. I don’t think that your fight in the Matrix is a valid test, honestly. Game balance generally looks to ensure parity in a few key areas: Spotlight time; Niche protection; Viable mechanical representation of concept; Survivability. I could go on at length about each of these, but I think most of us are familiar enough with the concepts for me to skip it.

There is one area in which game balance is used poorly, and I think it is this point that sticks in your craw. Game balance is often used as a structure to replace trust. The thinking goes that a properly balanced game can be played with asshats and run by a killer GM, and everything will still work out okay. This, obviously, is utter shit. Asshats can ruin any game. If the rules really are near-perfect, the asshats will just bend, or outright break, those rules.

The point to game balance is simply to allow the players to trust *the game*, not each other. To know that when they go up against an “appropriate” opponent, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding. And to know that each player in the band of misfits has an equal opportunity to enjoy the game. A well-balanced game reduces the friction that the system imposes on the story, both in closing gaps and removing blockages.

This article makes a point I was trying to make earlier, but better. I’ll have to send it to the dude I was talking to.

Monte Cook nailed this years ago. Back in the D&D 3 Dungeon Master’s Guide. Paraphrased:

“When something feels like it’s working, people will say that it’s balanced. When it doesn’t, they’ll complain about imbalance.”

I do believe, though, that it’s important for game mechanics to do what you tell players they’re going to do.

@Russell: Yes, I totally agree. And I think that’s something that WW has historically kind of fumbled with; more often WW books have said, “The rules work, but even if they don’t, don’t worry about it,” rather than “the rules work, and here’s why.”

[...] More importantly, they interact in predictable, logical ways. Notice, I am making no claim about game balance since that concept is debatable, but if you like the way the 4E rules work, then there’s no [...]