Is balance even a legitimate concern if the players stop being jealous of each other?

Is balance even a legitimate concern if the players stop being jealous of each other?

Isn't that why most narrativist games don't even pretend that balance is important?

Easier to balance a game than remove a basic human emotion.

It's not balance that's the important bit, whats important is that every player must feel that they're contributing an equal amount to the game, instead of it being the story of Lord Powerton and the four guys who hang around him.

In theory, if the GM is good enough and the players are good enough there can be enough situations to go around where everyone can be useful even if they suck at combat, such as social situations, detective work, sneaking around and bashing skulls.

In practice, a very large portion of the time in a game is spent during combat and players who can't contribute to the combat get left out.

Thus, balance is not that important in theory, but in practice its extremely important to everyone's enjoyment.

Most of the complaints about balance seem to be less about being able to contribute at all, and more about simply dealing less damage or being less pivotal to a fight.

It's the nature of competitiveness.

That's my point, though. In most games, fights are the single most important thing, with everything else taking the backseat, thus people who are not contributing to fights feel as if they're contributing at all.

If a GM actually managed to run a game where fights took maybe 25% of the time, with the rest of the time being devoted to other, equally fun, pursuits, then those players wouldn't feel like they're not contributing.

In theory it's possible, in practice I've seen it done only once in a game about political intrigue with a group that contained people who did some theater, and it was a very short game. Other aspects of the game almost always take a backseat to combat for the majority of the players and GMs.

Last game I GM'd I just fed the player a lot more details and held less encounters. A chunk of the time went to me helping them figure out how to make characters because players cannot into rulebooks apparently. It was their first time though, so I played a lot on their lack of expectations and encounter rates.

First of all this And secondly... it's not so much balance as it is consistency and for lack of better terms "rights and privileges".

The ruleset is like a Codex Hammurabi that, known to all, tells people what they can reasonably expect to be able to do or be allowed to do, and what steps they must take or requirements they must fulfill to claim the right to do those things.

When you vastly upset the cost vs. payoff or risk vs. reward for one type of character or action you make them feel battered and shortchanged.

Likewise this also plays into potentially balance affecting decisions a GM can make. If you rule that something works in a specific way one time, then your players should reasonably expect to be able to replicate this given the same requirements and circumstances.

So you can't make a one time drastic change to balance in order for something they do to "hilariously" misfire, or you can't make an enemy be an exception to the rule in one case, because if your players can reasonably acquire the training and/or resources involved they should be able to replicate the same thing, regardless of who did it, since you've established it as part of how your universe works.

As for that can have a lot more to do with the individual player than with the system's balance.
I've had players who played what is considered the most OP class/whatever in the system and complain that they feel like they can't contribute. It's them. They're ignorant of how to do it well, while someone with an average or slightly above average class that knows what its capabilities are will shine.

The worst thing a GM can do in that case is to give the guy whose complaining, despite being on the upper end of balance, an "exception" and buff them, because it breaks consistency, while making the other players who simply followed the guidelines set out by the system of "do this to do that" feel cheated.

Fights would be a lot shorter if everyone actually decided they should be proficient enough in the rules, or even just their characters, to not create holdups.

I like to point my players to videos of people playing Warhammer Fantasy/40k matches on Youtube, where they roll 10-20 dice a turn and just fly through the callouts of what they're doing, the measuring, the resolutions, etc...

It's all about actually being knowledgeable and comfortable with the system and everything flies by just fine. Usually the people complaining fights are too long are also the ones causing the most holdups because they just won't try to get themselves up to par.

The fuck you are even asking about, not to mention implying? Holy shit, I've seen some cheap and convoluted bait, but this shit definitely takes the Most Stupid Bait of the Week.

>while making the other players who simply followed the guidelines set out by the system of "do this to do that" feel cheated.

That's hardly the description I would use to explain the players who "somehow" end up with the strongest characters.

Players should not attempt to make their characters "as strong as possible", but it's their responsibility to try and balance themselves with the rest of the group. It shouldn't be a question of "Why can't you guys keep up with me?" but rather "My character is a bit strong, are there some more flavorful but less efficient options I overlooked that made make my character both more interesting and better mesh with the rest of the party?"

If you run an uber cheese munchkin then anything I throw at you that's a challenge for you will likely wipe the rest of the party. Makes planning encounters a pain in the butt.

So long as everyone is relatively close in power you'll get a game that works. So if everyone powergames then that's fine, you get the game you signed up for. But skewer too far one way or the other from the party and you're messing with everyone else's play and makes my life more difficult.

The modern trend is for people to put balance between characters as the top priority in a game, to the point where many people believe that this shouldn't even be questioned.

But, historically, balance was not put so highly on the shelf. Many games included decisions that were decisively against balance, including making characters with not only random stats, but random roles/races/classes/abilities (such as Gamma World). Many story-focused games actually warned against worrying about how strong the other players' characters were, since not only were these games intended to be primarily cooperative, but they wanted to distance themselves away from the wargame-type systems.

The question than becomes whether or not jealousy is the root of placing balance so high on the list of modern game priorities. While balance itself is good and should be strived for, there are many arguments against putting balance as too high a priority, especially when the common sacrifice is variety or mechanical weight.

Brings up a good point in that if the characters are too unbalanced, some players will lose agency. However, at what degree are characters too unbalanced seems to depend largely on the players and their emotions, as well as their expectations. In many cases, it may be that players who have characters that are virtually mechanically identical may still end up feeling jealous of each other, simply because of exaggerating minute differences.

user, ever heard about "competitive balance"? The very fucking root of all things, since lo and behold, TTRPG started as fucking wargames, with tournaments and shit. I mean do you seriously are so out of touch with the hobby and its history to try and rewrite both it and the reality?

Balance has nothing to do with being jeleous, especially in modern gaming, since people are rarely in this for pure game mechanics. In fact, its easier to get people to play "you know, pretend you have an adventure" than "you know, we will roll dice to see who dies"

Competitive balance applies to competition, and TTRPGs, while some originated from wargames, are a distinct departure from them, with cooperation being far more important. Many games even go so far as to discourage competition between players, or to otherwise reinforce that the other players' successes are the entire groups's successes.

And, keep in mind that not all TTRPGs have strong roots in wargames, with their mechanics being more strongly related to theater/dinner party role-playing games.

>Balance has nothing to do with being jeleous, especially in modern gaming, since people are rarely in this for pure game mechanics.

You've said what it isn't doesn't have to do with, but you haven't said what it does have to do with other than your assertion that because some games developed from wargames, a focus on balance is somehow an outdated relic from a previous incarnation of these games. That's actually quite contrary to the trend of games now being designed with a stronger emphasis on balance than they were in the past, a past that while having roleplaying tournaments be more common included vastly more deliberately unbalanced games.

>While balance itself is good and should be strived for, there are many arguments against putting balance as too high a priority, especially when the common sacrifice is variety or mechanical weight.

I would argue that balance is necessary for variety. If one option is simply better than others, then the others effectively do not exist.

Mechanical variety inherently disrupts balance, and the greater the mechanical weight, the greater the ultimate disparity.

While you can do something like say that all weapons deal 10 damage, and this opens up an infinite variety of flavorful options including one player wielding a fish and the other wielding the Empire State Building, the end result is a game without much mechanical distinction.

You're right, in that a measure of balance is necessary for variety, but it needs to be checked against other concerns such as mechanical weight. If balance is the highest priority, than the the majority of the mechanics themselves are ultimately unnecessary.

I agree. Balance doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be there. Every option available to the player (or GM) needs to at least have a reasonable argument in it's favor. Maybe a game has three healing spells, #1 has the strongest effect but requires a normal action and direct contact, #2 has half the effect but allows a small range to reduce risk to the caster, #3 is the weakest and requires direct contact but can be cast as a free action. As long as the numbers back it up reasonably well, you can make an argument in favor of all of them even if one might be slightly stronger or weaker.

You're kinda painting with black and whites here.

Not everyone who is effective in combat minmaxed the shit out of it, likewise the guy lagging behind might be straight up underperforming for the encounters the party is facing, and if everyone dropped to their level it would be a TPK, because right now the people "overperforming" are compensating for their underperformance.

If you want to slap them with the responsibility to balance each other with the group that goes both ways: People who underperform need to put in effort to step it up and carry their weight in encounters so that others don't have to take extra steps to get the party through.

Not a concern for all groups. Some of my players make terrible choices building their characters, but are happy as clams when they play. They're not jealous.

The players that make combat monsters make sure everyone else gets at least a little limelight. They're not greedy.

I make sure the adventure usually involved everyone's strengths at some point. We change systems frequently, so it's not like we found a perfectly-balanced system, either. Balance is a secondary concern if everyone looks at the game as a mutual effort.

>If you want to slap them with the responsibility to balance each other with the group that goes both ways: People who underperform need to put in effort to step it up and carry their weight in encounters so that others don't have to take extra steps to get the party through.

The issue is that it's much, much easier to make a character weaker than it is to make them stronger. At the end of the day, the encounters are being scaled to the party, and relative balance is more important than absolute strength.

it's the g in rpg that makes balance important.

The thing is, you're not making the character stronger, you're making the player be a better player. You're giving him a better understanding of how to do things and how to build things, and yes of course that's a longer term process, but otherwise you're literally just going with the lowest common denominator and saying everyone should be as shit as the shittest guy you have instead of actually making people better.

>Balance has nothing to do with being jeleous
That is horseshit and you know it.
There is a difference between feeling jealous and feeling like you aren't able to contribute as much to combat as others. But you are either incredible dense or willfully ignorant if you think jealousy has no part to play in people screaming about "muh balance".

>Balance is all about being jeleous
This is horseshit and you know it.

Also, if you seriously think people play those games only for the sake of combat - you need to neck yourself

Knowing how to build stronger characters does not mean becoming a better player. The opposite, usually. Making stronger characters often requires learning not how to do things in the system, but to exploit the failures and oversights of it.

For the most part, it comes down to the GM to give the players something to do then actual balance. If a player designs a character for a role (I.E. Mad scientist type who creates wacky but potentially dangerous gear to aid the group) the correct response is to create situations where that character can shine in the narrative. Unfortunately, this skill is lost on many GMs (when I ran the character concept above, my GM introduced an NPC two sessions after I joined who could pull power armor out of his ass... Rendered me completely redundant.)