Balance in TTRPG's

So I've seen the same argument more and more often on Veeky Forums recently, and I wanted to talk about it in its own thread rather than alongside some tangentially related discussion. It's expressed in a lot of ways, but it boils down to the idea that game balance doesn't matter in a cooperative RPG. I'd argue that that's fucking bullshit.

Does every system have to be perfectly balanced? No. I like plenty of games with balance issues, and it's basically impossible to make a totally balanced system with any degree of complexity. But that's no reason not to try or to excuse lazy designers who don't put in the effort to properly balance their games, and being balanced is an asset for a system regardless of what you want to do with it.

You don't want to run a balanced game? Well, the great thing is that a system already being balanced makes that easier. Instead of having to try and figure out which options are stronger or weaker, the system tells you explicitly, making it very easy for you to create those unbalanced parties and encounters you like so much with perfect certainty of how unbalanced things are. In an unbalanced system, you're much more likely to be surprised or have your expectations undermined by the mechanics, leading things not just to be unbalanced, but to be wildly unpredictable. You can get around this yourself, by doing your own analysis of the system or reading up on the community consensus- But why should you have to, if the designer can put the work in instead?

You say cooperative balance doesn't matter? Well that's just bullshit. In a team game, everyone being able to contribute is important. Some people might be more or less relevant in a particular scene or context, but everyone having something to do to help out is important for keeping people engaged. You can see a lot of this in the design of cooperative board games, as well as one of the key problems they suffer- If one player starts trying to play the game for everyone else, bossing them about or being able to solve it all themselves, it stops being a fun experience for the rest of the group.

Another angle I often see is 'The GM can balance it, so why should the system bother?'. This one always seems particularly bizarre to me. Having less work to do as a GM is a good thing, right? You've already got more than enough things to worry about without having to wrangle a severely unabalanced system into doing what you want. Sure, most GM's will make minor adjustments in any case, but there's a significant difference to slightly tweaking something to your preference and having to work against the rules and structures of the mechanics to ensure all your players are playing the same game. Good GM's can learn to run severely unbalanced systems, but why should they have to? Why use that to excuse designers just not putting in the effort to test and balance it themselves?

The other line that gets trotted out is the idea that balance must come at the expense of interesting design, and that aiming to balance a game necessitates only providing boring, bland options that make everyone act the same. In general this just just a ludicrous argument from the extreme, but as with most arguments of this type it's just a justification for lazy design. Striking the right balance between interesting options and well balanced ones is something that's difficult for designers to accomplish, certainly, but we see it achieved time and time again in other forms of game, where it's held in much higher regard, so why are RPG communities so quick to give unbalanced games a pass?

This isn't to say balance is the only important aspect of a system, or even the most important, or that for every group or GM it will be of equal importance. But no matter what your preference or playstyle, all other things being equal, a well balanced system provides advantages and lacks flaws that you'll find in a badly balanced system, which can and do have a meaningful impact on the experience of playing a game.

tl;dr because I prewrote way too fucking much in an attempt to address all the common forms of the argument- Balance is always a good thing, even if you aren't using it.

What matters in a cooperative social activity is that everyone is happy with the activity.

Hard, top-down, system-imposed mechanical balance doesn't matter, and it's anathema to the kind of open-ended experience that tabletop roleplaying games are supposed to create. You're hobbling yourself if you think this is the best way to go about making everyone happy.

Are you actually going to address any of the arguments, or just make an assertion?

No matter how you're using them, properly balanced mechanics are a good thing. Even if you don't care, that you won't have imbalances disrupting your game experience is still a positive.

>Hard, top-down, system-imposed mechanical balance doesn't matter, and it's anathema to the kind of open-ended experience that tabletop roleplaying games are supposed to create.

How does that work out? Good balance helps the GM plan and helps keep everyone feeling equally relevant to the game.

There's PURE balance (symmetrical), SPOTLIGHT balance and ASYMMETRICAL balance.

Using vydia as examples:
Pure Symmetry is what you see in Age of Empires (1 or 2) or Warcraft (again, 1 or 2): MOSTLY of the time the difference is merely aesthetic. That was the difference between a barbarian and a knight and a Pirate in OD&D before Kits.

Spotlight balance was also the focus in OD&D: Combat? Step aside, let the fighter shine. A trapped chest? Good heavens we have a thief. Or on the long run: Wizards have all the spotlight after level 7 or 9. This is boring because while the Decker is showing off his ability, the Street Sam is doing nothing of worthy or cool.

Assymetrical balance, found in D&D 4E, instead makes everyone shines every time, but with different lights. During combat (and 4E is great at it, all criticism aside), the fighter will keep enemies close to him, the rogue will damage greatly, the wizard will control the battlefield and the cleric will boost the allies.

Not caring about balance creates D&D 3.5, where the wizard Knock a locked door, becomes Invisible, Fly into the top of the tower, use Stone to Mud to opne a hole in it to rescue the maiden through applying Feather Fall to her and throwing her out of the tower. So, yes, you idiot, balance is of extremely importance in TTRPG.

I think what people like in 4e that doesn’t exist in 3.5 even a little is honesty. 4e said: “this is what you are playing” and it was true, and even 5e says: “this is how to make your character.” 3.5 descriptions tell the player what they want to hear regardless of the truth, like rangers are highly mobile units or fighters are the best of combat instead of being simple to build. Or if a spell said “maybe keep this one for NPCs” or “only award this spell has a treasure worth X gold.”

I'm aware I'm basically just stating the obvious, but I was hoping to get the people who argue otherwise to give me a clear argument as to why, since it often gets muddled up in the particular details of a specific game, rather than confronting the point in general.

>balance must come at the expense of an interesting game
This can be true though. Let’s say every 5 pages of rules is 1% balance. At 100% you force everyone to become rules experts to even get started instead of focusing on other aspects of the game experience.

I would argue that in the case of ttrpgs, the more complex the system the more tedious it is to perfectly balance it

(I know it’s not the best example. I’m trying here)

> Let’s say every 5 pages of rules is 1% balance. At 100% you force everyone to become rules experts to even get started instead of focusing on other aspects of the game experience.

...What?

Mechanical balance goes straight out the window the moment players with actual brains get involved.

Most of this only holds true if you play fantasy dungeon-delving games. The solution is to stop having such shit tastes.

How is that in any way true?

And it will only be worse if the system is less well balanced to begin with.

Look at CoC, or AFMBE, or GURPS. FATE... There's lots of games where the 4 man band where everyone has a niche and combat is the only expected overlap DO NOT appear.

And that's completely irrelevant to the central point? Those games still mechanics that allow characters a degree of interaction with or control over events. Balance in terms of utility is just as important, if not more so, than balance in combat. And in terms of utility, people will have their niches and specialties, unique ways of interacting with the system that other people do not share, and if one of those is significantly more or less useful than what everyone else has it creates a problem for the GM.

>Hard, top-down, system-imposed mechanical balance doesn't matter
yes it does

So is there really nobody who disagrees and is willing to argue their case?

Perfect balance isn't the goal. The moment you try to call anything perfect, you have to define perfection, and that's just a headache compared to defining good enough. Consider pissing in a bathroom. You don't want people to make a mess, but you can't really stop every particle of urine in the air from escaping the bowl. You can do pretty well enough though and just not directly piss outside the toilet.

4e pisses normally, but when 4e calls 3e out on deliberately pissing on the wall, 3e says "You still got microscopic urine particles everywhere through the air. Trying to get every single drop where it needs to be is ridiculous." To that I say, I don't need the room to be laboratory-clean, I need a system that won't piss on the walls.

I've played RIFTS three times, 3e four times, and exalted twice. I can count on my girlfriends the number of times I've had a game that wasn't one player character dragging around his party of orbiters. This wasn't because of anybody trying to be degenerate or useless, it basically happened by accident because the way RPGs are typically presented, 0% of the effort goes into showing the players by design what they need to pick if they want to actually do anything. This is where fuckfaces go "rule 0 you need a good GM. you're a rollplayer lalala." The issue with jerking off to the importance of the GM distracts from a core problem. If I'm just showing up to be a part of the GMs story, why even bother with a character sheet or a system at all? At that point, the RPG system is a distraction from the improv. Maybe this is a core reason behind the worse-is-better mentality of tabletops. Having a fun game distracts from the GMs fantasy.

What people don't get is that nobody likes to wank over 4e like it has some perfect mathematical precision. Honestly, some of the math in 4e is sloppy. However, a student that does their homework sloppily and gets a C is infinitely preferable to a student that draws a dick on the paper and turns it in.

The hardcore grognard crowd have a "worse is better" mentality. According to some groggy players, balance and other qualities have a constant sum, so you cannot improve balance without somehow making the game worse. It's basically applying a retarded version of alchemy logic.

Anybody with a functioning brain knows that balance is different from things like variety and roleplaying, and does not compete with them.

I guess I was just hoping to give people the benefit of the doubt. I see the argument that balance doesn't matter posted quite a lot, but it's always caught up in a conversation of a specific system which makes it hard to really get someone to state their point directly, so it's difficult to really understand where they're coming from without getting muddied in the details of the specific system.

I have kinda suspected it only exists as an argument to protect systems they like from criticism, acting as if it doesn't matter therefore their preferred games can't be criticised for lacking it, but I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I think some of it might be sincere, people whose playstyle just involves so little actual interaction with nuances of mechanics it never comes up, but when someone seems to tend towards that playstyle they never really seem to want to directly confront the fact that they aren't actually using the system. It's a bit frustrating.

Guys, I took the essence of grognard crunch philosophy and distilled it to create the perfect RPG.

That's pretty cute user. Made me chuckle.

You should make a supplement that is other professions besides baker but are copies of it and a bunch of bonus rules only for GODs including no-roll baking and bmx crafting.

...It's a nice joke, but I'm not sure it deserves its own thread

A last bump for hope of any actual counterpoints.

Spotlight balance is good when handled correctly. Deckers are an example of how not to do it; giving a character their own game within a game is terrible for the other players.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with having fighters being good at fighting, clerics good at keeping people alive and protecting people against evil creatures, rogues good at stealing and disarming traps, and wizards being general utility outside of those areas.

Everyone shines, everyone gets to do their part and be a hero in some component. If there are 2 fighters they can work together and shine together.

This idea of 4e style "Reduce all classes to a role and make each role identical besides flavour" is cancerous WoW shit.

Spotlight balance allows everyone to be their own hero in the area that they want to be heroic in. It is the best type of balance we have.

>This idea of 4e style "Reduce all classes to a role and make each role identical besides flavour" is cancerous WoW shit.

Good argument son

Same to you. I can't reason you out of an opinion you didn't reason yourself into, especially if it's not coherent.

Roles are an emergent property of any teamwork exercise. Even games that were not deliberately intended to have roles at all (pokemon for example) develop roles. WoW imitates life here, and not the other way around. 4e does prescribe roles rather than let them emerge, but not only is there flexibility within a role, but prescribed roles also occur in other mediums. A good example being that professional sports absolutely did not take the concept of roles from WoW.

What does "make each role identical besides flavour" even mean? Clearly a wizards role is different from a rogue for reasons beyond flavor.

The game is entirely combat focused and as such all classes are only differentiated in the wargame that is a combat encounter.

If you treat 4e like a wargame then it is fine. You pick a role, then a class within that role and you kill monsters and get loot, then use loot to kill monsters. Just like WoW.

If, however, you want a game where combat isn't 95% of the game then it is a steaming pile of garbage.

>inb4 MUH SKILLS SECTION
4 pages given to skills compared to 36 given to combat. Even 4 pages is generous compared to the 2 pages given to roleplaying.

...and now you're resorting to unrelated rhetoric. I'll be brief.

D&D invented the kill monsters get loot formula

Counting pages is not a meaningful predictor of quality. An 8 page skill list wouldn't necessarily be 100% better than a 4 page skill list.

The majority of the roleplaying and fluff guidelines are in the DMG, so that the DM is free to decide the tone of his own game.

Here is your (you).

>The game is entirely combat focused and as such all classes are only differentiated in the wargame that is a combat encounter.
So is arguably every edition of D&D as soon as it stopped awarding XP for treasure plundered.
>You pick a role, then a class within that role and you kill monsters and get loot, then use loot to kill monsters. Just like WoW.
Again, just like every other edition of modern D&D.
>4 pages given to skills compared to 36 given to combat. Even 4 pages is generous compared to the 2 pages given to roleplaying.
Have you just been playing with the blinders on these last few years? Because the only major difference between 4e and 3.PF is that 4e was more honest about where it wanted its focus to be upon.

This stale bullshit again? Really?

unrelated rhetoric?

All characters do one thing, kill stuff.

Even in the DMG the combat section is more than 2x the size of the non combat one.

...But that's explicitly a lie? I'm looking at the 4e DMG table of contents right now.

Combat encounters is pages 34-50, building encounters is pages 52-67. That's 31 pages out of 222.

4e is not an RPG.

>This idea of 4e style "Reduce all classes to a role and make each role identical besides flavour" is cancerous WoW shit.

Build me a fighter that is like a swordmage. A rogue that is like a sorcerer. Maybe a cleric that is like a warlord, or a druid like a psion.

This. Fucking this. You know what an awesome game is? Ars Magica. You know what has HUGE baked-in caster supremacy? Ars Magica. This isn’t an issue in that game though because the game straight-up tells you that it’s a game about a caster and his entourage (plus there’s a cycling mechanic, but that’s not important to the session-to-session gameplay). Same with Exalted and playing mortals.

Character imbalance can be fun... IF it’s done correctly and IF it’s done willingly. Lying to players and saying that a sneaky thief or punchy monk is equivalent to a spellcaster is shit. That only leads to people getting frustrated when their character become irrelevant.

Is the only 'argument' anti-balance types actually have just sniping at 4e? Is that the only reason this bullshit still exists?

Spotlight works if and only if the niche doesn’t hog the, well, spotlight. A thief who’s shining moment is a single roll will rightfully feel bored and left out when 70%+* of the session is combat. Same with deckers in Shadowrun.

*>inb4 revisionist grognards cry about D&D not being combat focused and that only 4e focused on it. D&D has always been extremely combat-focused—4e was simply honest about it—and your anecdotal evidence based on a court intrigue Pathfinder game that lasted all of three sessions until it died is irrelevant.

Basically yes. Anytime people shit on 3.PF and how imbalanced it was, they will always say "buh 4e" because they cannot actually defend how poorly balanced the game is.

I wouldn't really call that imbalance.

Balance doesn't mean all options everywhere in the system are perfectly equal. It means that the system is aware of how powerful they are and informs the players and GM of that, so that you can make an informed decision when building characters and challenges, being aware of how powerful the various options are.

Although IIRC Ars Magica does somewhat suffer the issue of magic systems, where some specific branches of magic are overly potent and broad?

>D&D has always been extremely combat-focused

Why do people who know nothing about D&D continue to make wild assertions about it?

Go read 0, 1st, and to a lesser extent 2nd edition. It was never "super combat focused", combat has the most rules because it's difficult to referree in a way that's fair and contains danger. Combat is still a last resort and not the focus of the game, which is dungeon crawling.

Stop pretending Gygax and his friends didn't want to play Conan the Barbarian : the game.
That doesn't make the game bad in anyway, mind you, but it's obvious that it was one of the main focus, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered making it fair that much.

The game's roots was borne as a homebrew to a wargame that they made. Just because I can die in one hit in Dark Souls doesn't mean that that the game suddenly has a focus on exploration, it just means that combat is deadly and that you can't just rush in and tank every blow like you're Superman on steroids.

user, I like your reasoning here. Do you have the time to skim my homebrew 24-hr RP and give me your thoughts on balance?

Each player makes a martial artist, chooses a clan which has focus and guidance, then customizes their d8's with various trait charts. Combat tries to balance positioning, chance, player customization, and storytelling. I tried to make it quick to roll up characters, learn the rules, and make conflict.

Are you fucking stupid, you disingenuous piece of trash? D&D takes its roots from Chainmail, which was a wargame. THAC0 is a direct inheritor of that. The fact that characters are described in terms of killing power doesn't ring any bells?

Huh. It's certainly a very interesting approach, the randomised action tables are a concept I don't think I've seen before. It's hard to judge balance without having anything to really compare it with. I'll do a bit of a deeper delve, but the ideas you have at play do attract my attention.

If there's 10 possible builds, and only 3 of them aren't incredibly weak then that harms the open-ended experience by making players feel punished for picking anything other than those 3.
Having some options be way weaker than other options can be even worse than just not including the options, since it creates a trap for new players to fall into, and presents false promises.

Even if you want the possibility of some characters being more or less powerful, it would be better to do so by rolling or deciding beforehand who's going to get the short/long stick.

I’ve read the old adventures, there’s combat literally every room with random encounters rolled basically every turn.

*Good* D&D isn’t combat focused, but D&D definitely started combat focused and then got rid of a lot of it pretty quickly (arguably with the different box sets and certainly with basic).

Thanks for taking the time, user

Do you realize that balance does bot need to be explicitely written out in the rules? Balance just comes with good desing, no need to write it anywhere.

>No matter how you're using them, properly balanced mechanics are a good thing.

You're so naive it's almost cute.

True balance only exists between identical mechanics. Even the slightest change introduces imbalances that people can bend to their advantage. "Properly balanced" is a nonsensical phrase without any real meaning to it, and it ultimately culminates into a matter of opinion, since everything short of perfectly balanced (ie. identical mechanics) is just some measure of being imbalanced.

While the designer should strive for balance to some degree, balance comes at the cost of diversity, and when a designer focuses too much on ensuring everything is as balanced as it can be, individual choices lose meaning and distinction and the game feels weightless and bland.

It's why most people didn't like 4e and why narrative games remain unpopular.

This was addressed here The goal isn't PERFECT balance. The goal is "stop pissing on the walls" balance.

It was also addressed in the OP

>The other line that gets trotted out is the idea that balance must come at the expense of interesting design, and that aiming to balance a game necessitates only providing boring, bland options that make everyone act the same. In general this just just a ludicrous argument from the extreme, but as with most arguments of this type it's just a justification for lazy design. Striking the right balance between interesting options and well balanced ones is something that's difficult for designers to accomplish, certainly, but we see it achieved time and time again in other forms of game, where it's held in much higher regard, so why are RPG communities so quick to give unbalanced games a pass?

Balance =/= being equal in all respects
Balance is when each option from a list has strengths and weaknesses that in an average campaign would make them just as useful to their team as the other options.

An example of balance is the relationship between the knight and rook. The rook can go further and is more simple to use, but the knight can jump over enemies, and can surprise enemies since it moves in a weird way.
An example of imbalance is the rook and the bishop. On paper the fact that each of them has 4 directions to choose from makes them sounds equal, but in practice because the bishop moves diagonally half of the squares on the board are entirely impossible for the bishop to set foot on.
It's fine since chess is a symmetrical game where each player controls 16 pieces, but if it was a cooperative where multipe players working together controlled 1 piece then bishop would be siht, but rook and knight would be close enough in overall usefulness that they would be balanced.

Boy does 5e shit all over your theory, not that your post makes much sense since “perfect balance” as you define it is literally a core mechanic which is what all TTRPGs use.

>a core mechanic which is what all TTRPGs use
No, it's a design philosophy which is almost always attempted but is difficult to accomplish

>so why are RPG communities so quick to give unbalanced games a pass?
It's because there are basically two kinds of RPG players.

1. Newcomers that don't see D&D as a complex ruleset, but rather as a simple fantasy improv game.
2. Aging luddites.

The first category are going to take decent balance for granted and will not attempt to notice anything is wrong until something messes up their game. The second has a "everything was worse in my day, and it was better that way!" mentality.

The third category, people that are acquainted enough with RPGs to know that the "G" stands for "game," but aren't held down by elderly stubbornness, is a minority. If you notice that some of the gamist elements of RPGs are unnecessarily flawed at no benefit to the RP elements, you are a very small audience within a very small audience.

WotC did not repeat their mistake again, and 5e was the most well-researched backpedaling the company has ever produced. It's designed to appeal to the kids and the old grogs.

The unfortunate thing about this whole mess is that 4e and 3e are actually a similar style of game in some ways. They are both games that seek to greatly expand upon the gamist elements of D&D. Some 3e players won't admit this, but the heavy combat and economy focus was born in 3e. This gamist style is basically dead with 5e, and for good reason. WotC would never be willing to take a risk on a gamist D&D again. The sick irony of the 3e crusades is that if it weren't for paizo, their entire subgenre of gaming would have died with them.

5e is wildly unbalanced though, with the best combined options shitting on the worst options.

5e supports the idea that worrying too much about balance isn't as important as providing interesting options for the players to sort out for themselves.

>An example of balance is the relationship between the knight and rook. The rook can go further and is more simple to use, but the knight can jump over enemies, and can surprise enemies since it moves in a weird way.

Rook is worth 5, knight is worth 3.

Your rant gets popped in the first sentence because I explained what perfect balance is.

Your argument gets popped because your definition of perfect balance is a blatant strawman and represents an idea that pretty much nobody wants.

It helps illustrate the major issue with putting balance too high on a pedestal. Perfect balance is an extreme, but even less-than-perfect balance can still result in the same failings.

Moderation in all things, even moderation. Too much balance, and the game is boring. Too little balance, and the game is not fair. Where that sweet spot lies? That's a matter of opinion, and trying to pretend that there's a universal standard that all games should strive for is silly.

Do you have any evidence for the idea that balance can only come at the cost of other aspects of the design? Because I'm calling bullshit on it.

>5e supports the idea that worrying too much about balance isn't as important as providing interesting options for the players to sort out for themselves.
Once the interesting options are established, there is not reason to not do a once-over on balance except for laziness.

I don't personally know if the balance in 5e is reasonably flawed or "piss on the walls." I consider 4e to be flawed within reason, like almost every game that put some effort into design.

Why is it you faggots always turn a general discussion about gaming into a D&D screaming match? Is that legitimately all you people know about or does D&D just carry so much baggage that you can't stop flinging your shit when it gets brought up whether you actually play or not?

>Do you have any evidence

Perfect balance. If there was nothing wrong with perfect balance, every game would be perfectly balanced.

Understand yet?

5e has a minimum adequate functional balance. The OP options are slightly less OP than 3.5, the worst options are still vaguely able to contribute rather than being made completely irrelevant. It could be a lot better and certainly deserves criticism, but it's a significant improvement over 3.PF, which is what most people compare it to.

...What the fuck are you talking about?

Presumably because it's the only way to defend unbalanced mechanics, and because the D&D defence force takes any potential criticism as a personal attack. It's depressing.

Not that user, but the argument basically goes.

"balance is only possible if you make every character ken/ryu. Therefore balance should be sabotaged and ignored."

This ignores the obvious intuitive solution, that balancing a game without making every character ken/ryu is difficult and takes trial and error, but good enough balance to make the gameplay fun IS possible.

I remember 4e was broken on Veeky Forums before the game was even officially released.

But, it was the design philosophy of "the game must be more balanced" combined with "similar options are more balanced" that lead it to being poorly received. It started to move away from that philosophy later in its lifespan, but by then it was too late.

I keep hoping there's more to it than excusing lazy design, but this thread has shown me little to counter that theory. It really does just seem to boil down to 'I don't care so they shouldn't bother'.

>So I've seen the same argument more and more often on Veeky Forums recently, and I wanted to talk about it in its own thread rather than alongside some tangentially related discussion.
Yeah, it’s got nothing to do with trying to discuss creating balance and more to do with Veeky Forums over the last 8 years or so pushing out all of the genuinely creative/creating people on Veeky Forums until there’s nothing left but /pol/ trolls and 40k threads.
People are arguing about it because there’s not really much to do on here anymore I’m afraid.

Maybe people should stop being insane conspicuous consumers that make corporate branding a part of their personalities so they can take criticism of external products non-personally.

If fucking only. But it never will. Marketing has gotten really, really good at turning customers into cultists.

I content the notion that 4e classes were designed to be similar to each other. The only thing they all have in common is that they all have attacks that are color-coded. You could have color-coded the attacks in earlier editions and got a similar presentation. Sure, WotC could have mixed it up and made it so that different classes got a different pattern of colors as they leveled, but this would be a superficial benefit at best. WotC did learn that superficial differences are huge to critics, so irregularity in leveling was introduced to the essentials line.

The idea that 4e classes are similar, even in just the players handbook, comes from superficially skimming over the text. Even within the first book and the same role, the gameplay of the fighter is completely different from the paladin, and the rogue from the ranger.

So, you don't understand.

Perfect balance is obtainable. I explained what it is. It is a game with identical mechanical options, or, in truth, a single non-choice. Some games actually have made this their design philosophy, by making all choices be non-mechanical in nature, and whether you're good or bad at something more or less often has no actual bearing on anything.

That is the end of the road of balance. Most games stop well before there, but even as you simply approach that destination, it becomes clear that the more balanced you make a game, the less distinct the choices are, and the more you try to retain that distinction, the more unbalanced the game becomes.

The pieces of chess are not intended to be balanced, because diversity of pieces makes the game interesting. But, the players both have identical sets. But, because one player moves first, they have a tremendous advantage. So, they play multiple matches, alternating who goes first.

Balance comes at a cost. If it didn't, we would simply already be playing nothing but perfectly balanced games.
And those are hardly games.

D&D hold lions share of the market.
Because of that people are more likely to be familiar with and thus be able to directly discuss dnd, and because dnd had great power it also has great responsibility

I'm a game designer and one of my most common types of balance is what I like to call "motivational asymmetry". Say you have a roughly symmetrical game, but give variable player powers. These powers should change payoffs for some actions in the game to be better than others in some way.

As a quick example, if I make a 4X game and one race can gather +1 mineral when they produce, then the player with that power will be more motivated to produce some of the time when the extra resource is appropriate. It's a subtle payoff change that gives the player a new mixed strategy such that some X% of the time more than usual, they use "Produce" actions than they normally would. If this is done for each race and carefully playtested, it's obviously not perfect balance, but the end result should be every player with equal skill winning roughly equal numbers of games.

If you keep adding these variable powers in the same manner, you can build an entirely new play-style that might be balanced toward the others, even if it's complex. No need to calculate an NP-hard solution. The natural tendency for things to grow relative to themselves when changed iteratively should keep you from having to make more than minimal tweaks.

Fuck Balance, Just let wizards do their thing. Games more fun when you let MAGIC be MAGICal. Grew up on AD&D and nobody at my table had a problem!! It’s a Team game and if the wizard ruins it the DM can kick him in the pants!

I understand completely. I'm just not sure why your pseudo-intellectual drivel is at all relevant to a discussion of functional balance in real games.

Although hell, even your central assertion is just that, an assertion. It's perfectly theoretically possible that you could create a perfectly balanced game with a huge variety of distinctly different options. It would just take a ludicrous amount of design work, testing and tweaking to actually function.

>Even within the first book and the same role, the gameplay of the fighter is completely different from the paladin, and the rogue from the ranger.

>alternate between my at wills
>use encounter powers when my class role is expected to
>use my daily powers when my class role is expected to against the solo encounter

It gets pretty samey. You could actually replace most players with simple programs and not be able to distinguish whether one character is being played by a human and whether one is being operated by a computer less powerful than a calculator.

So you've not actually played the game then? Got it.

Because that is not at all how it works in practice.

That's a stupid fucking argument that can be applied to any game under the sun.

> It's perfectly theoretically possible that you could create a perfectly balanced game with a huge variety of distinctly different options.

That's strictly impossible. Even a simple game with two nearly identical options winds up being unbalanced in some form or another.

Take a look at those thousands 2 damage/1 speed vs. 1 speed/2 damage sword threads, and see just how many thousands of considerations people must make when deciding between the two, when on the surface they are both swords that deal 2 damage a cycle.

>I understand completely

You're not even at the starting line of this discussion. You've made the most ludicrous of possible statements, and expect anyone to take you seriously.

>That is the end of the road of balance. Most games stop well before there, but even as you simply approach that destination, it becomes clear that the more balanced you make a game, the less distinct the choices are, and the more you try to retain that distinction, the more unbalanced the game becomes.

Maybe a clearer goal is to focus on diversity in viable options? If we use this metric, then "perfect balance" is actually the ultimate lack of options on one side of a spectrum because there is only one true option. On the other hand, terrible balance results in there being only one or few options for another reason.

However, balance and variety are NOT a constant sum. There are very real changes and decisions you can make that improve balance, but do not reduce variety. The corollary is that there are decisions you can make that greatly harm the balance of the game, WITHOUT adding any more variety to the game.

The problem with deciding that balance doesn't matter is that it creates a false sense of variety. If the designer wants to make ken and ryu different, and does so by just making ken do only 50% damage, then that is a case of false variety. This false variety is the essence of what "good balance" is trying to fix.

I'd wager that it would take a much shorter time to figure out a computer was controlling a 3e or 5e character than it would take to discern whether a computer was controlling a 4e character.

Do you have an argument? Because you're still just making an assertion.

Is it extremely complex? Sure. Is it impossible? No. And I don't think you can prove that it is.

All you're doing is excusing shoddy design with the idea that balance must come at the cost of interesting options. It's a bullshit excuse that other gaming media disproves time and time again, and only serves as a defence of games that don't put in the time, care and effort to actually analyse, tweak and balance their options.

Because once again, nobody is talking about perfect balance. Functional balance for a variety of diverse options is perfectly possible if a designer worth their salt actually puts the time and effort in to achieve it.

Move, full attack. pass? That's a 3e turn.

It's unfair to 4e to assume that the 3e player is going to use their unique options available in the system and that the 4e player will not. Being reductionist for either side is disingenuous.

>4e is shit but 3e is worse
>Clinton is shit but DRUMPF is worse!!!!

This is actually a really good point. Functional balance is basically the act of ensuring the widest variety of options are actually available for use in the game without it interfering with the players experience. This is probably a better way of expressing why balance is a worthwhile design consideration than most others in the thread. Thanks!

You could do that for most other games. 4e is one of the tactically deeper games (with the caveat that one-note builds like uber-chargers exist) where less of your tactics relies on mathematical calculations (which are straightforward and one is objectively better than the other) and more relies on timing and combining abilities of different characters for maximum effect... again, assuming you are not building a hyperfocused team that tries to cheese combats with a single strategy.

Not defending WhatAboutism, but sometimes there are degrees of shittiness and it's valid to bring them up.

If a student gets a D+ on their test and fails, they aren't a very good student. However, if they try, and they are teachable, improvement is possible. He might be able to exceed expectations and get a B at some point.

Another student draws a dick on the paper and turns it in. He also fails the test, but for a different reason. This student doesn't want to be reached, and will never exceed expectations.

>Is it impossible? No.

Prove your assertion. Hell, I'll go easy on you. Show me even a simple game with even 6 distinct options that is perfectly balanced.

I'm going to go even easier on you, and tell you before you even begin that you're going to wind up with either six non-choices, or an unbalanced game that you naively thought was balanced because you failed to appreciate concepts such as reliability, offensive/defensive advantage, or even something as basic as the idea that a perfectly balanced game is balanced in ALL scenarios. To even imagine such a thing for something like a roleplaying game is the funniest little bit of stupidity I've seen in a while.

Any fool can program a bot to walk up to the closest enemy and spam full-attack until someone dies.

Even magic would be simple to program since a lot of spells written in the book already have all their dimensions, limitations, and functions already written out.

Nope. The burden of proof rests on you.

Your argument isn't that its impossible, it's that it's difficult to achieve. And I agree with that! In practical terms, the amount of effort required to perfectly balance a diverse array of options is utterly ridiculous and would probably require a supercomputer.

But it's still possible. And you can't prove otherwise.

By the way, all of this is still entirely irrelevant to why functional balance is a good and necessary thing in roleplaying games.

At the same time though, excusing one form of degeneracy by point out that it's the lesser evil does not in fact make you better by comparison, it just means that you're the least shitty option available, like going out with a guy who has a shit personality and spreads STD's because the alternative is a neckbeard who hasn't washed since 2008.

>Show me even a simple game with even 6 distinct options that is perfectly balanced.

Please stop doing Nirvana fallacy. Perfect balance is impossible (even with symmetry, Chess and Go are not perfectly balanced, one side always has the advantage... you need perfect symmetry, like with RPS for that). What people are looking for is a level of balance that guarantees that play isn't disrupted by imbalance. Many, many boardgames achieve this, very few tabletop RPGs do or even attempt it.

>In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning a game's rules, usually with the goal of preventing any of its component systems from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. An unbalanced system represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game's entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.[1]

I don't think you're right about perfect balance because a balanced system would just be one where none of the options are ineffective or undesirable. It's not relevant beyond that point that every option is *equally* effective or *equally* desirable. Or at least, I think that's the most useful way to approach the concept. In that sense, a game with zero undesirable options is already "perfectly balanced" even if those options are not perfectly equal.

You can point out of course that what qualifies as "effective" or "desirable" is subjective. But that's a feature of game design in general, and you have to work with what is reasonable and what you think players will enjoy, not just an abstract idea of perfection.

The grammar of this post reads like an old man posting in the comments section of a newspaper article.