Hanging in the Balance

Game balance has become a relatively hot topic again this week among the RPG blogs.  On Friday, Unnatural 20 posted Game Balance is Unnecessary for Fun.  True or False? Among the responses is RPG Blog II’s Ok, Let’s Talk Game Balance.

It’s a topic that seems to occasionally recur since (at least) the release of third edition, and the release of fourth edition only seems to have given it new life.  Some people see game balance as a necessity.  Some think that it actually stifles the fun by normalizing everything.

I think one of the main problems is that the phrase game balance is used by different people to mean wildly different things.  Additionally, these different areas are of different importance to a given campaign.

Party Balance. This one predates third edition, and usually isn’t called out as “game balance” specifically — but I’ve seen people get confused because the word balance is in there.  It deals with the makeup of the party — its ability to cover all of the bases.  A party with a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, and a priest is balanced in this sense (at least in theory); a party with three fighters and a ranger is not.  The former party has members to cover combat, stealth, arcane magic, and healing/support.  The latter party is redundant in some areas, such as straight combat, and completely lacking in others, such as arcane magic.

Party balance is usually important to a game run on the base assumptions of the system, but it’s generally possible to run an offbeat specialist-centered game — such as a Mission: Impossible-style all-rogue Dungeons & Dragons campaign.  The GM may need to adjust some assumptions in order to handle an unbalanced party (or the players may need to be extremely careful, if the GM chooses not to), but in itself, it’s not dangerous to a game.

Power Balance. The balance of power between party members can be a delicate issue.  This is the center of much praise and criticism of 4e:  it undoes the differing power curves of earlier editions and attempts to cause all classes to achieve roughly the same power level as all other classes at a given character level.  No more wizards who start out useless after round 1 and ultimately become powerful enough to blow away most encounters in a single round; no more fighters who dominate at level one and are still doing the exact same things, just with more plusses, at level 20 (when the wizard doesn’t blow away the entire encounter before he acts, anyway).

I think it’s pretty clear that I’m in favor of a rough balance of power.  It avoids the appearance of unfairness.  I don’t think everyone has to be equal — I’ve run 250-point HERO campaigns where someone will choose to play a sidekick character, taking fewer character points to build with.  But I think it’s important that everyone has an opportunity to play on an equal footing.  It’s one thing to willingly choose a lower power level for your character; it’s another to find that your choice of a certain class, skill set, or ability has left you behind the rest of the group.

Some argue that this is only important for games that focus on combat, because if everyone focuses on roleplaying, then everyone will have an equal opportunity for that.  I would like to agree with the thought in principle, but I’ve already seen in practice that it’s untrue.  A brief diversion:

Legend of the Five Rings is a roleplaying game in a mythic Japan setting.  Although it has the usual rules for combat and sorcery, it’s unusual in that social roleplay and etiquette are highly emphasized in the rules themselves — in fact, one of the character classes is a courtier.  Most of the (admittedly few) games I’ve played in the system have been extremely RP-heavy, to the point that it isn’t unusual to have a whole party of courtiers.  At one particular convention game, though, we had five courtiers and a bushi (warrior).  I ended up feeling very sorry for that bushi — he had enough social skills to not embarrass himself, but he couldn’t come close to any of the courtiers.  In a fight, he would have shone, but we courtiers were able to use our own abilities to completely avoid all of the potential combats (and it would have been OOC not to).  The bushi’s player gamely roleplayed through, but I can’t imagine that four hours spent in everyone else’s shadow was much fun for him, any more than four hours of pure combat would have been for the rest of us.

The fault may be partly the GM’s for not anticipating that outcome — but the system didn’t help matters.  Short of ignoring the rules and forcing a fight sequence or changing the plot of the module, I’m not sure what could have.

This is one of the potential pitfalls of the “strong in X, but weak in Y” style of character balance — it’s fine if X and Y occur in equal amounts, but not so good if Y happens a lot more than X.  This is also the problem with earlier editions of D&D’s “weak early, strong later” style of balancing the wizard:  being useless now in exchange for making the fighter useless later is not really a meaningful balance, especially if the game never progresses to “later” — or if it starts at high level and the wizard never has to deal with the “weak early” part.

There are always going to be ways of gaming the system, of course, but I think it’s important that a system make an attempt.  Two 350-point HERO characters might not be equal if one if built sloppily and one min-maxed to maximum efficiency, but for the most part, the number of points provides a pretty decent estimation.  Likewise, two fourth-edition characters of a set level usually shouldn’t be vastly different in power levels.

Encounter Balance. This definition of balance measures the power of the party against the power of the monsters they encounter.  In its strictest definition, a party will always encounter creatures who are a good challenge for them — not too easy, not too hard, but within a level or two of themselves.  This is, in fact, the default assumption for the average encounter in both 3e and 4e.

By itself, encounter balance isn’t a bad thing.  On the whole, it leans toward being a good thing, in that characters will neither be bored by a too-easy encounter nor unfairly obliterated by an obscenely-difficult one.  However, it does cause potential problems when adhered to too strictly.

If absolute encounter balance is always enforced, then the players will soon come to understand that they never encounter anything completely beyond their abilities.  They may begin to discard options such as negotiation, fleeing, or trickery.  Encounters may begin to fall into a set pattern, playing out in more or less the same way.  This leads to greater boredom — bad.

The solution is to simply realize that game balance doesn’t require that every single encounter be tailored specifically to the party.  If they know that an ancient dragon lives in the mountain, and they go there to explore, then they should probably encounter the dragon, even if they’re low enough level that it could kill them by blinking.  If they go to the mountain and don’t encounter the dragon, then there should be an in-game reason for its absence, even if they’re high enough level to blast it to atoms with the sheer force of their presence.  Because that dragon lives in that mountain.  It doesn’t know what level the PCs are.

I do see a lot more people falling into the encounter-balance trap in 3e and 4e than I did with earlier editions.  I can only assume that the presence of the EL/CR and encounter-design guidelines causes some to regard them as absolute rules for every encounter.  They’re not.  They’re good guidelines for when you want to provide a fair challenge — which should be usually, ideally — but sometimes the party might have an encounter just because it makes sense within the game world, whether it’s balanced or not.

Game Over screen from Balance of Power 2. This is not the result of a single die roll.

Fair Encounters. This is distinct from the one above, but appears related on the surface.  Earlier editions of D&D had a tendency to present encounters with various negative consequences by fiat.  The invulnerable PC-drowning water weirds of Unnatural 20’s post are one example; the infamous sphere of annihilation in Tomb of Horrors is another.  Level draining, equipment disenchanting, permanent ability damage, save-or-die effects…  These are all things that have fallen out of favor in later editions, becoming easier to mitigate or recover from, or disappearing altogether.

I think this is a good thing.  The main argument for keeping these sorts of mechanics seems to be “to challenge the players” (or sometimes “to frighten the players”).  I don’t see that as valid.  Sure, you engage the player’s attention by threatening permanent harm of some sort based on the roll of a single die — in some cases, without even that! — but you do so through a cheap metagame device.  If inciting fear is your intent, you should be working on atmosphere and timing, frightening the players through their imagination of their characters’ experiences.  That’s far more real, and far more difficult, than a threat to draw a line through some of the numbers on the character sheet.

It’s even worse when the artificial “challenge” isn’t evenly distributed.  Does a rust monster, by itself, honestly challenge the party?  Of course not.  It only serves to weaken the fighter.  Mordenkainen’s disjunction, which disenchants all non-artifacts in its area of effect, is an annoyance to a wizard, but he’s still got his spells — the fighter is now left without armor or weapons.  Level-draining vampire?  The fighter in the front lines is in trouble, again… although if the vampire is smart, the cleric gets it first.  And every level drained makes it easier for the vampire to hit again the next round and drain more levels…

Undoing a month’s worth of play — experience, treasure, character life — in a single hit isn’t really a challenge, it’s a gamemaster power trip.  As far as I’m concerned, the change from “save or die” to giving the characters a real chance to recover is a wholly positive one, and with nasty effects such as poison, disease, and curses still around, it doesn’t reduce the challenge a bit.

In Summary: Strict by-the-book balance with no exceptions is not your friend, but neither is complete lack of balance between characters.  On the whole, it’s better for a ruleset to present a method of roughly balancing characters than not.  Actually balancing the characters may not be necessary for a given game — but ideally this should be at the player’s option, and determined in a fair manner.  Encounters suited to the party are a good idea, but sometimes an encounter could and should be present just because the world says so.  And encounter elements that cause lasting damage to the characters without giving them a chance to fight back or to recover are probably poor encounter elements.

Related posts:

1. 4E from One Year In
2. What is D&D, Anyway?
3. Defining Roles
4. What Skill Challenges Aren’t
5. Hacking Skill Challenges