Is game balance the most important part of a system?

No.

Depends what the point of the game is.

In a competitive game, balance is probably the most important thing because otherwise it's no items fox only final destination. Here, it's important because the objective of the game is to defeat another player.

In a more cooperative game, balance is important too but in a much different aspect. In a game like D&D, players want to feel like they are making meaningful contributions to the group. Martial characters remain enormously popular despite their relative weakness next to mages because hitting monsters hard and killing them is satisfying and makes you feel like you've contributed. In a game like this, characters don't need to be on the same power level to be balanced; they just need to have meaningfully different strengths. 3.5 had wild imbalance in druids and clerics who were objectively better than fighters at fighting, but arguably less so with wizards, who broke the game on their own fronts but less commonly outdid martials at their own game. The imbalance there came from making the martials completely irrelevant at all, which would make those players feel like they weren't getting to contribute.

This, I think, is why D&D 4e had such strong criticism of its equalized form of balance. Balance was so flattened that what one character could do didn't really deviate enough from anyone else. You didn't really feel like your own character contributed in their own unique way; at least, not as much as in other systems.

As to other game systems, it depends what the source of fun in the game is. WoD usually revolved around getting the better of your fellow players, and different characters had different ways to do that. Plus, it enforced roleplaying restrictions much more than D&D does (there's really no practical roleplaying downside to playing a warlock unless your DM goes out of his way to enforce one, but being, say, Sabbat is a big restriction in VtM.)

Balance is important in games meant for match play. Otherwise, it's mostly a meme for people terrified they may not "win" at RPGs.

How is that a "non-statement" exactly?
>But what does it need to do?
>what is the game?
Oh, you're a pedant, I gotchu senpai.

Here's the thing, in tabletop RPGs, the rules define the sorts of games the system can handle by default because the rules will (or at least should) always focus upon the elements that are most important to the average campaign under that system.

The general rule of thumb: If you have a mechanic in the game that only works under that game's specific rules, it generally means that the rules were built with that mechanic in mind and not just stapled onto the side because the designers thought that it was cool.

When you have a game that just throws a shitload of rules into a blender and serves you the result without proper testing, you end up with 3.PF, where every mechanic seems to operate on separate rules that barely interact with one another and you're stuck with 300 pages of rules where only like 5% of the pages are worth reading.

short answer: yes, because imbalance makes the game less fun for weaker people

long answer: in moderation, since too little balance leads to the short answer, while perfect balance is basically havign every single character be equal to one another, since balance is impossible as long as any 2 characters have a difference. people can have fun in an imbalanced setting, as long as things can be stacked up so that nobody notices

If we're talking about an RPG system, then no. Balance is important, but the most important thing is that various options are viable.

It's similar to balance, but the specifics are different. Balance is about making sure that the various options in different situations are roughly equal in terms of power, so that no one aspect has an overpowering advantage in a specific situation.

Variety doesn't have to stick to that idea, because it can absolutely allow some things to be broken as all hell in specific situations. Rather, the overall importance of variety is that each player is capable of doing interesting things in the situation they've chosen to focus on.

I guess it can be considered balance as well, but I feel the distinction is important. More conventional idea of balance are intended for competitive environments, while RGPs are ultimately cooperative ones. Trying to make an RPG balanced by those ideals often just leaves it very bland and uninteresting.

What part of D&D bars modern detective drama? There was even a 2e module with the players travelling into an alternate dimension/time (which curiously resembled 1980's Wisconsin) and having to figure out their way back while relying on modern analogs of their characters.

If the constraint you are trying to establish is genre, that doesn't really work when genre tend to largely just be a skin on the mechanics.

We can always say that D&D (or any other game) does what we needed it to do if we remain flexible, and simultaneously can say no game does what we need it to do if we try to formulate boundaries that exist only superficially.

only for gamists

t. ignoramus

Like it or not, a system affects what type of setting can be effectively played; mechanics do play a role in determining flavor. An extremely simplified example: you can't play a setting with magic in it in a system that does not include magic.

Game balance is less necessary, but a "Points" balance is necessary.

Like a 40K Terminator is tougher than a vanilla guardsman. Sure.

If model count was the balancing factor, then yeah, this'd be bullshit.
Instead, there's a point value to each, so there's at least some semblance of balance in the long run.

I think that's the problem with a lot of fantasy games. Sure, there are those in the camp that hated 4e for "Making everything into casters". Myself, I would have prefered it if levels reflected the strength of each characters' abilities as a similar points system.

So sure, mages can get super powerful, but why isn't there a mechanic built into the game that makes certain classes quicker to level up then others in order to keep things fair, or some sort of "Effectiveness" calculation so that at the very least, GMs have a hard and fast guideline as to how tough they should make enounters compared to the players. If a fighter and a wizard are both level X, but the fighter is only half as useful as the wizard, there should be something quantifying how useful each are.

This

My group recently started Deadlands Classic. In Character Generation you pull 12 cards from a standard playing card deck to generate your attributes and can increase those attributes after Chargen with exp. Each player was given 3 pulls to make a character. Out of curiousity I took the highest pull and my middle pull and then calculated how much exp the lower characters would need to catch up. From my Middle pull to the High pull was about 325 exp or about 100 sessions worth of exp going at the suggested rate of 2-4 exp. That is a huge difference in character value. With the success rate the higher character would enjoy it would be like playing a first level character in a party of 8-10th level characters. The GM would have have to slow pitch to the weakest character because if he challenged the stronger the weaker would be a skidmark.

What makes D&D "epic" though? It sounds more about a matter of campaign than system.

PVE balance is a meme; you shouldn't always be in situations where the enemy is equal to you in a fight because it makes the entire campaign feel like less of an adventure and more of a high stakes carnival ride.

PVP balance on the other hand is important, but only in the sense that every player option should be able to contribute at least once per session, just so you don't end up in situations where one group of players is carrying the team while everyone else is struggling to remain viable.

Balance is less important than designing an experience, but I'm not so arrogant in believing that I have crafted such a wondrous system that I can ignore balance.

I think you're asking the wrong question user.

I think the question should be "is reliance on a strict rules system the best way to create a feeling of game balance?"

The cardinal sin of judging a game system is to assume that the rules in a book can be responsible for balancing a game, when any decently made TTRPG can feel balanced in the hands of a good Game Master.

If you as a GM create tailored scenarios which showcase the skills of certain party members, and are conscientious in making sure everyone is faced with opportunities and adversaries which challenge them, slightly less damage per round or non-optimized multiclassed characters can still enjoy the game because it was specifically written for them to flourish in it.

If I had to answer the question you posed OP, I'd say that statistical balance is mathematical and it helps, but game balance flows from the people playing it.

more importantly, hitpoint bloat leads to healing spell/potion proliferation, one of the most obvious ways of how mechanics can affect setting

4e is the best game WotC has put out, but it's not an RPG.

that is NOT the question. the question is how hard will a game system make it for a GM. because, you see, with every houserule the GM introduces, he expends political capital and when he runs out, the players might start to balk at his constant houseruling and shit a la
>fuck you, GM, I wanna play D&D/Star Wars/Warhammer and not your stupid homebrew

No. Balance is not the most important part.

Fun is the most important part. Is the game fun? If yes, nothing else matters. If it isn't, no amount of balance will save it.

The most important part of a system is that it inspires the GM.

>hella
>fr*cking
>epic
Aren't you supposed to be busy writing Life Is Strange 2: Hellapocalypse?

You seem to live in a world where you play games where the players do not trust the GM and try to work against him rather than with him.

I would hate to live in such a world.

But you play a role in a game so by fucking definition it is a fucking RPG, you mongoloid.

By that definition, games like Mario, CoD, MtG, Resident Evil, Candyland, and so on and so forth are RPGs.

Why should the players trust the GM when he keeps adding a bunch of house rules to a game that either do nothing or make shit worse?

I mean, even the most tempered of friendships can become strained when every week, it feels as though the rules keep changing for arbitrary reasons.

Making all things equivalent is death to the game. examples are Shadowrun which effectively has only 2 classes which both rely on the same attribute (electronic or magic), and 4e which effectively only has 1 class as everyone does just about the same thing only with comical flavor names for the effects.

You're acting under the assumption that houserules are bad, games are delivered perfect and tailor fit, and that any issues with consistancy can't be solved with polite discussion.

Your world must be Hell.

>hitpoint bloat

Oh, this is your buzzword way of saying Low Lethality.

>Balance is shit, but fuck it's so hella fr*cking epic!
Until you play a monk, and/or that other guy plays a wizard. It was better in 4e and 5e, but in 3.5e you have some classes that make almost everyone else in the party redundant, and other classes that aren't even good at the one thing they're supposed to be good at. Wizard and Truenamer occupy the two extremes in that spectrum.

>You're acting under the assumption that houserules are bad,
Most houserules are made by amateur game devs who think that they know better than the designers without actually knowing anything about the way the rules work. It's rare to find house rules that are actually well made and add something to the game without fucking up some element
>games are delivered perfect
I wouldn't go that far but generally, unless the game is outright broken, every element within its rules are designed with whatever flaws in its design already taken into account.
>and tailor fit,
Not on the their own, but taken as a group, you can find a system that can satisfy whatever needs your campaign requires if you're willing to do some digging.
>and that any issues with consistancy can't be solved with polite discussion.
The issues with consistency are caused by the GM adding house rules that cause inconsistencies to occur.
It's very rare to find house rules that are actually well made and

Not him but I will never understand the people who deny HP bloat being a thing. Any fool with basic skill in math can see that damage doesn't scale well with the amount of HP that a PC can potentially have.

FFS, with a high enough CON modifier and max rolls, you can hit 100+ HP by level 6-12 with every PC, even a wizard who only gets +1d4 HP each level.

It's good that there's some easy fixes for those. The problem with big systems is that a lot of people working on them end up creating some inconsistencies, but it's hardly much of a hiccup anymore thanks to all the resources available on the internet.

Same thing with GURPS, in that it can get a bit messy thanks to its size and some rather large inconsistencies even with similar subsystems (GURPS in particular has a weakness with magic, and I spent much too long trying to cobble something out of the base Magic book until someone guided me through Thaumatology). Thank god for the GURPS general.

>Any fool with basic skill in math can see that damage doesn't scale well with the amount of HP that a PC can potentially have.

You must be a special kind of fool to think that this doesn't simply translate to PCs being able to go through more battles before needing to recuperate.

>FFS, with a high enough CON modifier and max rolls, you can hit 100+ HP by level 6-12 with every PC, even a wizard who only gets +1d4 HP each level.

Low lethality really doesn't mean anything to you, does it? It means that the characters are not expected to die easily.

But, you're starting to sound a bit silly, so I'll just leave it at you liking high lethality, and trying to coin buzzwords to designate something you dislike.

Person who likes 4e here. The HP bloat issue is that monsters are the same, at least if you use the MM1 maths. It makes combat into a boring slog where everyone can tank a billion hits before they finally go down.

>he keeps adding a bunch of house rules to a game that either do nothing or make shit worse?
it's not like they don't do nothing, it keeps the players from exploiting the loopholes of the system, thus curbing their ego powertrips. that can set players off if it happens too often.

That's a specific issue that has a simple resolution, and I don't think he's talking about that because 4e has mechanics to reduce healing spell/potion reliance, the most obvious being healing surges.

Here's the thing, if PC's can go through a shitload of combat encounters without rest aren't expected to die, then what's the fucking point of combat then?

no, low lethality can also be had by making hitting hard, for example. or low damage weapons. potion belts are needed when you have lots of hitpoints and repeteadly take lots of damage, so that you have to refresh.

>it keeps the players from exploiting the loopholes of the system, thus curbing their ego powertrips.
The reality of the situation is that the people who found ways to exploit the rules will also find ways to exploit house rules, because most people aren't professional game designers and likely only decided to patch up what was readily apparent at the time without considering the repercussions of how this would affect the game as a whole.

The opposite is also true, where a house rule is made purely to spite a supposed loop hole when in reality the rules are working as intended, which can lead to several elements in the game breaking as a result.

If by "shitload" you mean 3-5, I think that's a gross misuse of that word.

In general, low-lethality is for groups that are invested in their characters and the story revolving around them. But, it's also for groups that enjoy long-term strategy over short-term tactics, and enjoy gauging how much they need to spend and invest in each battle without having to simply fully commit everything to each one.

Stop replying to obvious trolls.

>no, low lethality can also be had by making hitting hard
Not really. That's a statistical fallacy that leads to the PCs simply being at the mercy of bad luck. Any individual PC is expected to suffer more attacks than any enemy, putting any favor towards high chance (like in the case of making critical hits more damaging) much more deadly than what may initially be assumed.

>for example. or low damage weapons.
That's really just another way of saying High HP.

You can argue about HOW important balance is, but I fail to see how anyone could conclude that it's the MOST important thing.

>If by "shitload" you mean 3-5, I think that's a gross misuse of that word.
If by "3-5," you mean per session then I got news for you, that is a shitload of combat.
>In general, low-lethality is for groups that are invested in their characters and the story revolving around them.
Why play them if you don't want to risk them dying though?

Yes and no. Too much imbalance can wreck the fun of a game, but once different characters are more-or-less balanced (when any random character archetype can both contribute meaningfully and often in ways that don't feel contrived, and won't completely overshadow other character archetypes), then from that point it pays diminishing returns. Pretty-well-balanced is much better than unbalanced, but perfectly-balanced is just a little better than pretty-well-balanced.

Balance is irrelevant. A GM should be able to create situations in which all party members have a role. And if one person excels at everything then the gm needs to have a talk with that player and/or alter the system to fit the game's needs.

I know people will say this us a cop out which doesn't excuse a bad system. But the way I see it, blaming the system is a cop out which doesn't excuse a bad gm.

There are few systems out there which can't be made enjoyable at the hands of a good gm.

>A GM should be able to create situations in which all party members have a role. And if one person excels at everything then the gm needs to have a talk with that player and/or alter the system to fit the game's needs.

And a system should make the GM's job easier, not harder. Unless you're arguing that no-one should ever play a system other than OD&D.

t. Pathfucker

Why don't you just play video games if you lack the willingness to alter a game's rules to suit your needs?

If you want to "alter" Pathfinder to be balanced, you need to start by burning down the rulebook.

Because there are other systems which may not require nearly as much "altering"

I want the changes I make to a game to be changes that make it better suited to some specific campaign, in terms of the challenges to overcome or the mood to be set. I don't want to make changes just to get the game to function as advertised.

If you buy a car, then maybe you want to modify it to make it run faster or more efficiently or whatever else you want the car to do. If you have to take it apart and put it back together just so it stops making that clanging noise and shutting down every couple of days, it's a bad car. You're neither a bad mechanic nor a bad driver; it's just a bad car. The time you spent getting it to work is time you could have spent making it really great.

>3-5
>per session
>a shitload

Really? My group does about 10+ encounters a session pretty routinely.

That's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make though.

If system A has mechanics you and your group enjoy but has some OP builds or character options, while system B is balanced but you find it boring, are you seriously telling me you will choose B over A just so you don't have to change anything?

If you phrase it so everyone in the group likes the unbalanced system and doesn't like the balanced one, no

Well then I guess we just have an irreconcilable difference of opinion since I bought a jeep wrangler which is notorious for breaking down because I liked the car so much. I don't mind getting under the hood now and then not to mention the modifications I've spent money on. It's more enjoyable to me then a reliable land cruiser would have been.

>If system A has mechanics you and your group enjoy but has some OP builds or character options, while system B is balanced but you find it boring, are you seriously telling me you will choose B over A just so you don't have to change anything?
Yes, because if balance is that important to the game I'm trying to run, time that I don't have to spend combing through OP builds on charops is time that I could be spending working on the campaign as a whole.

That's a false dilemma. Believe it or not, regardless of what you want to play, there's almost always more than 2 games for it.

What system and what campaign?

This. A good DM can handle a bad system, but a ok or bad DM will really suffer. The system as a base should be fun. Mechanics are fun. Balance is important to some degree, obviously the DM has to handle some things but the system should do its best to make his or her job easier.

Ha. No. Fun is.

Game balance is a vesicle for maintaining things to be fun. If balance is getting in the way of fun, it should be tossed out.

Most important part? No, but it is generally a prerequisite to a system being good. All choices in character creation should matter roughly equally, all other things equal. Balance between the players and GMs should also be important, but that's less of a rules thing and more of a courtesy thing.

Obviously a pyromancer won't be very useful in an underwater campaign, and a fish man won't do very well in a desert campaign, but that's not the point.

>vesicle
vehicle, ugh.

>may

That's a pretty harsh "may", especially when the number of garbage games out there is truly impressive. If your group has found one they like, it's really much easier to reskin that to suit your needs than to go through the web of lies and false advertisements conjured here and elsewhere in hopes of netting your group.

After sampling some fifty games, I've grown to recommend people to avoid specialist systems, generic systems, and other silly gap-filling ideas and to just grab some of the titles that are just flat out "good". It's much easier to tweak a good system than it is to pray there's another good system out there that suits your needs and that you'll be able to find it and convince your group to play it.

If your aim is to balance things out, you are shit, your game is shit and your entire bloodline is shit

5e, currently level 9, lots of politics and mystery but the big focus is the ongoing war against the dwarves.

...and you do 10+ combat encounters per session?

This is a trick question: Yes and no, depending on what exactly you mean by balance.
Should all options be functionally identical? Not in most games, no.
Should all options have consideration placed on niche and role, so that every type of character has palpable and meaningful strengths and weaknesses? So each, say, class' worth and engagement is in balance? Yes.

Think of it like this:
Chess is balanced because both sides have identical pieces in an identical starting configuration. Its gameplay is also enriched through the unique strengths and weaknesses of individual pieces.
Ideally in an RPG the balance of abilities across the spectrum of character options should be like the differences between pieces rather than the difference between white and black sides of the board.

Different strokes for different folks, but you couldn't pay me to say, run a superhero game in 5e. I've never been in a group where people wouldn't be able to pick up the basics of a system well enough after a session or two

The most important thing of a game is the people you play with

A system needs to do three things (in decreasing priority):
- Create a common understanding of how the world works
- Provide the GM predictable levers to pull to affect the experience
- Generate interesting situations on its own

Balance is important to all three points, but mostly the second. If the GM wants to, say, provide a difficult but beatable combat challenge for four third-level characters, they should be able to do that by the book as much as possible. I mean, perhaps the third-level plant monster is not the right choice to challenge the party with a Fire Wizard, but we shouldn't need to throw out the entire collection of third-level monsters if someone's playing as a Vorpal Knight or Fail Rogue.

You can also make it work if you say "this class is straight up worse than the others, here's how to compensate for it" in the rules. But that's pretty rare, and having someone on the forums say "of course wizards are better than fighters, duh!" is not a valid substitute for rules that actually help you. (Ars Magicka actually does have characters that intentionally suck. It's an interesting read.)

>That's a pretty harsh "may", especially when the number of garbage games out there is truly impressive.
In a world where you can easily download .pdf's of every tabletop RPG in existence for free, this doesn't really matter as much as it did when everyone had to buy physical copies of the rulebooks.
>If your group has found one they like, it's really much easier to reskin that to suit your needs than to go through the web of lies and false advertisements conjured here and elsewhere in hopes of netting your group.
It really isn't, unless you're one of those amateur game devs who thinks that you can slap a few rules onto a system and call it a day.

>why isn't there a mechanic built into the game that makes certain classes quicker to level up then others in order to keep things fair
Older editions of D&D did this. The magic-user was the most powerful class so it required a lot more experience to level than a thief.

>lots of politics and mystery
>10+ combat encounters per session
Those numbers don't add up senpai.

>The magic-user was the most powerful class
It was often much safer to be the fighter and not deal with the turboshit d4 hp

Clearly they're talking about 'encounters' aka any dice rolling situation, puzzle, etc. But the thing they were replying to was very clearly talking about combat and said so. A 3 round 15 minute quick tussle isn't what most people consider combat. The poignant sting of a glass of wine thrown into a man's face at a dance is not combat either.

>The magic-user was the most powerful class
This is just a lie. There was only a handful of good spells and they took forever to fire off.

Yes? My group is three veteran players, if you think that's worth mentioning.

Really? I guess your math must trump my reality. I'll go tell my group some guy on the internet told me that what we're doing is impossible so that we need to stop.

Are you literally fighting crippled babies with parkinson's disease or something? Because none of those numbers add up one bit.

Next time you shitpost, at least try to make it believable.

Battles typically last 5-10 rounds, roughly 20-40 minutes each. That's roughly 4 or so hours of combat to hit 10 battles, with a few 1-3 round battles mixed in alongside an occasional hour-long battle. Since we play 6-8 hour long sessions, the idea of 3-5 battles being a lot seems a little silly.

Do you guys take ten minutes just to get through one round of combat or something? Or do you only play for 3 hours?

Okie dokie. I'll try to keep reality from bursting your dream bubbles, since it seems you really depend on your dream bubbles as the foundation of all of your arguments.

You overplayed your hand, you fucking shitlord.

...

>Do you guys take ten minutes just to get through one round of combat or something? Or do you only play for 3 hours?

He's probably a brain damaged 4rry and spends the entire session on one encounter.

>Is game balance the most important part of a system?
OP, let me put it this way:

If I am paying you for the mechanics you wrote, then yes, they must be balanced.

Otherwise I may as well just homebrew.

An analogy: if I am paying you to install a door, it must be hung with the right balance so it works every time I use it. If you don't, I won't pay.

You still haven't exactly explained what it is you're fighting though. I mean, there's a difference between fighting a bunch of goblins and fighting an adult dragon for example.

Excuse me while I get the Nobel prize for sending in your post as an isolated anf purified form of the element of Irony.

Both take 5 hours in 4e, so doesn't make a difference.

Answer the question sweetie.

What exactly are you fighting 10+ times in one session on average?

If a fight takes 20 minutes to solve then imho it wasn't worth playing out to begin with. I play PF and I want to weigh out my tactical options, check my spells, etc. It's about enjoying solving a puzzle instead of a diversion you rush thorough. Can you *really* claim you enjoyed a 20 minute fight? I don't think so.