How To Balance A Game...

[MisterPoppet]

Hello. Though I am a new member, I've been watching for quite some time.

I wish to know if anyone has ever had balancing issues with numbers and abilities and such, and how you solved them?

This will surely aid in my goal in ruling the wor-... Ahem, finishing my game.

Thank you.

-MisterPoppet-

[Shreyas Sampat]

Can you clarify your question a bit there, and possibly bring up a specific issue you are tackling with your own game? This isn't really the place for polls.

That said, "balance" can mean a great deal of things. The d20 system seems to be concerned with balancing character effectiveness, while something like Unisystem (I haven't played it, so this is hearsay) uses Plot Tokens (or some such) to bolster the effectiveness of players whose characters are less strong, so everyone ends up having more or less balanced influence on the game overall, but it takes different forms.

[Ben Lehman]

I wish to know if anyone has ever had balancing issues with numbers and abilities and such, and how you solved them?

BL>  It depends on what you are balancing for, and the specific mathematics involved.  A purely Drama-based system balances very differently than a complex, resource-distribution miniatures combat subsystem, which balances quite differently from gambling style Fortune heavy system.

So, I think the first two steps are this:

1) What am I balancing?  (spotlight time, resolution effectiveness, player narrative control, "plot," etc.  Note that these are all interrelated, but it is important to identify your goals.)

2) What are the mathematics involved?  A surprising number of things can be stripped down to pure mathematics.  If you can, do it.  If you can't... well, clearly, don't try.

Even in the cases where you *can* strip it down to pure math, though, don't forget the social element.

Was that helpful?

yrs--
--Ben

[MisterPoppet]

I'm really just speaking of mechanics balancing. More specifically, point costs. Take my game for example...

My game (it's more like a system though) has a high amount of mechanics but it exists without specifics. Within it I'm making a system for having traits (wealth, fame, etc.) and special traits (laser vision, flight, etc.), but I do not list a predetermined set. I'm allowing them to choose for themselves. I felt that the best way to allow one to obtain traits was through a point buy system. I made a list of categories that was ordered by the location on the character (body, mind, spirit, other) and the effect it has on things (self, someone else, an area, etc.). When one selected a trait, they would find which category it goes under and use that price. Well, here's my balacing dilemma. I am unsure as to how to go about choosing point prices. Somehow, I get a feeling in the back of my head that says to guess and check, but that would take much too long. What advice could one give as to ending this dilemma more quickly?

Thank you for your time and answers.

-Poppet-

[jdagna]

When it comes to character balacing (which seems to be the most prevalent type when people talk about it), I started my game design by saying "Who cares about balance?"  I was then very surprised to have fans praising the system for being perfectly balanced.

As best as I can figure, this is what I did:
1) There are 9 base Career Areas (+2 more in a supplement).  Each is the best at what it does.*
2) Players are encouraged to discuss campaigns so that they pick characters that are relevant to the campaign. **
3) Career advancement is flexible enough that people are encouraged to change Career Areas (via specialties within them) frequently.***

As a result, people pick the things they find most valuable at each step, thereby protecting their character's effectiveness in the game.  And thus, all characters are always "balanced" as long as people keep making common sense choices about what to learn next.

Here's a detailed explanation of how I think each point helps, compared to D&D (since D&D is a standard when it comes to debating balance, and the fans in question used it for comparison).

* I think it's important that each Career Areas is undeniably the best at its function.  D&D classes often have competing function - barbarians vs fighters for instance.  They both kill stuff through physical power.  

** D&D has an added problem in that all classes are generally expected to kill stuff anyway, because that's the emphasis for play.  If my game had that kind of emphasis, everyone would play a soldier and they wouldn't be balanced because attributes are determined randomly.  But each skill group (medical, technical, piloting and so on) are essential if the game is played as recommended.  Rephrased another way: the GM creates game balance by requiring the skills of different characters at different times.

*** Almost all D&D abilities stack up and increase.  In my game, you primarily add new abilities, and you can add new ones from nearly any category.  This means that even a brand new character can slot into a group of veteran PCs without being totally worthless and that a career soldier can jump into medicine without a long period of relative ineffectiveness (as a D&D fighter would suffer if he took a level of thief or cleric in a high-level game).

Edit: Oops, crossposted with you.  Maybe that's not exactly what you're looking for, though I think some of it may apply in terms of what abilities you offer.  In my experience, I simply assign everything a flat starting value and then do mental comparisons on how valuable I think it would be in a variety of situations.  The more valuable, and the more often it's valuable, the more it costs.  If you keep doing these mental comparisons and shift points up or down, you'll quickly come up with some good numbers that playteters can refine a little through trial and error.

[TonyLB]

Poppet:  It sounds like what you want is to make sure that the in-game effectiveness of a particular amount of spent points is the same no matter how they are spent (within reason).

So, gratuitous example, you wouldn't want a 1-point Boxing Skill that gave a +2 to punching damage, and a 5-point Martial Arts skill that gave a +2 to punching damage, because they aren't balanced against each other in terms of effectiveness-per-point-spent.

Is that correct?

[MisterPoppet]

You would be correct, Tony. That's what I'm looking for.

Hmm... the starting flat then adjusting might work. I'll look into it.

-Poppet-

[TonyLB]

The Currency view of mechanics (as promulgated in Sorceror and other places) can often make this sort of calculation much easier to judge.

If you have a +3 to hit out of 1d20, but then +2d6 damage after you hit (if you hit), but not if it's a critical, and only against hobgoblins... yeah, that gets hellaciously hard to balance.

If your system does damage equal to exactly the difference between your to-hit target and your modified roll, however, then you know that a +2 to hit is roughly equal to +2 damage (in that it is likely to cause +2 damage).

You're still going to have to playtest the holy heck out of it, but a system where you understand how abilities translate into objectively measured effectiveness is a good place to start.

[M. J. Young]

O.K., there are a couple aspects of this entire question that might be considered the metabalance questions, and you should consider these.

[*]It is important that players have equal opportunities to impact the shared imagined space. What their characters do is not so important as how much influence they have. Player metagame resources can create this kind of balance. If I understand it correctly, Buffy is an excellent example of this--player characters who are weaker in game give their players the ability to manipulate game events beyond the control of the character to a greater degree. Legends of Alyria does this in an entirely different fashion, by making every character important to the story (character generation is integrated with plot creation), so no matter which of the characters you play you've got an important part.[*]It is important for every character to have his moment in the spotlight. No one should dominate the game through having the strongest character, but everyone's strengths should compliment everyone else's so that each has his opportunity. Niche protection mechanics are usually regarded as the best for this approach. D&D's class system is the best known of these, in which you need a thief to open the doors and remove the traps but you also need a cleric to keep the party alive and healthy. These characters aren't especially useful in a fight, but they are vital when it is their turn to shine. A different approach to the same idea is the Primary Skill Area concept of Star Frontiers, in which military characters excel at combat skills, but technical and biosocial characters are also vitally important to play overall; although anyone can learn any skill, resource costs create the tendency for a character to favor skills in his Primary Skill Area over those outside it, and so protect each character from becoming superfluous, as long as you don't have so many that redundancy becomes evident.[*]It is important for every character to have the potential to be equally effective in every situation, or at least to have the ability to choose effectiveness such that this can be the case. If you have weaknesses in one aspect, these should be fully compensated by strengths in another. Most point-based systems attempt to achieve this.[/list:u]
You seem to be after the third of these, trying to make sure characters are equally effective across the board.

One approach to this is to ignore the "special effects" aspects of the skills and create a costing scale that prices the mechanical effects. For example, let's say that someone wants to create a fireball that does four dice of damage. What does this cost? The system tells us that attacks doing four dice of damage cost twenty points. That would be the cost of a fireball, a four-dice ice blast, a great cleave sword strike, a head-buster kick, a mind blast, or any other attack that does four dice of damage. Ah, but does it hurt everything? Again, put it in the costing system: if the attack has no effect on specific percentages of likely adversaries, it gets so many points back.

You would similarly cost out skills that enable escape, skills that protect against injuries, skills that heal or restore, skills that enable travel, and any other abilities that you perceive as potentially relevant in play.

In short, design the system such that the effects are managed mechanically and the descriptors are color.

It's only one approach, but seems best to fit your notion that you want the players to be able to invent their own special abilities.

--M. J. Young

[Callan S.]

Hi MisterPoppet, welcome to the forge!

Okay, why do you want balance? The main reason I see it used in D&D is to promote choice. For example, if one class was easily superior to the rest then most everyone would play that class all the time. There would be no choice because anything else would be stupid to play, tactically.

If this is one reason you want balance, then check as you design that there are no easy choices (ie, you'd always use power X and not crappy Y). Only the eventual in game circumstances will make one set of powers better than the other, and it is part of the players (not PC) skill to recognise them and use them aptly.

If you can find no clear strategy from just reading the rules (you must play or learn about the game world to find strategies), then you've pretty much succeeded at this element of balance.

[MisterPoppet]

Actually, D&D does do the "this class is better than that" thing. though it doesn't look that way at first. my group players are all rules lawyers during character creation. in fact, my brother made most combat characters obsolete when he made his ranger. though the new 3.5 makes the ranger look bad at first, my brother discoverd a way to make it a better killing machine than any other class (he's been easily killing dragons at lvl 13). luckily for me, he won't divulge his secret and won't be making another ranger for a while after this dies. (Note: Barabarians are useless in D&D, except as a screaming moron)

Anyhow...

Hmm... I really like your idea, Young. This style of doing things appeals to me, and causes less complication in the matter. I have decided to use your method in trying to balance things. Thanks. ^_^

And thank you all for your valued advice.

-Poppet-

[Simon Kamber]

Actually, D&D does do the "this class is better than that" thing. though it doesn't look that way at first. my group players are all rules lawyers during character creation. in fact, my brother made most combat characters obsolete when he made his ranger. though the new 3.5 makes the ranger look bad at first, my brother discoverd a way to make it a better killing machine than any other class (he's been easily killing dragons at lvl 13). luckily for me, he won't divulge his secret and won't be making another ranger for a while after this dies. (Note: Barabarians are useless in D&D, except as a screaming moron)

I regard this as a good example of the balance in D&D. When you can have two persons both arguing that their class is the best, no exceptions, you've got something right. I personally believe barbarians are a very valuable contribution to a party, especially coupled with a cleric. His d12 hit die and +4 con in rage allows him to stand up to heavy punishment just long enough that the rest of the party can do their thing.

So, if one can say the barbarian is superior, and the other go for the ranger (which I personally have failed to turn into something useful so far), they're balanced ;)

[MisterPoppet]

I don't know.... We have had a lot of barbarians in the group. So far they've been pretty useless. Their rage isn't all that great. In fact, if the rage was more powerful, then he wouldn't be useless. He can't wear armor though (at least, not a lot). He'll never be as good at attacking as the fighter. He doesn't get the combat feats like a fighter. And his only other major abilities are improved speed and trap sense (which is a bit useless if you can't stop the traps before they attack you). All the really good abilities come at the very end when he's already laying dead and bloodied up because he can't live long enough to get there. Our barbarians have never lived past level 9. But this is just my opinion. If you happen to make good barbarians, that's cool. Plus, I would also want to know how you make them to be useful. Our barbarian guy could use the info.

-Poppet-

[Vaxalon]

Did you get the point, Poppet?

As long as you've got a significant argument over which classes/races/whatever are better, then you've got a good indication that there's balance.

It just doesn't look like it from your POV.

I find the player-to-player balance level in D20 to be fairly good.  Whatever imbalance is left, I can even out by playing to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual PC's as a DM.

[ffilz]

It also bears pointing out that balance is specific to a campaign. Barbarians might not be balanced in Poppet's campaign. This of course is part of the myth of balance.

Frank