Ponderings on Game Balance

[Drew Stevens]

Question: Is game balance an important issue in your games? And if so, what is game balance?

Is it neccesary that characters within a party be balanced against one another? Against the challenges they face? That the relative cost vs advantage of their abilities balances? That the special powers all be equally valuable by some objective measure?

What are the relative advantages gained by playing a low scale game? What about a high scale game?  Can game balance be maintained in high scale games?  In low scale?

How significantly different is this from a Gamist perspective of design than a Simulationist, or a Narrativist?  I mean, clearly the Gamist perspective put balance first and foremost- what about the others?

And other such questions. :) I have some answers of my own, but I'm curious as to what ya'll think.

[simon_hibbs]

Question: Is game balance an important issue in your games? And if so, what is game balance?

Is it neccesary that characters within a party be balanced against one another? Against the challenges they face? That the relative cost vs advantage of their abilities balances? That the special powers all be equally valuable by some objective measure?

For me there are two aspects of game ballance that are important.

1. Are the players ballanced relative to each other.

I think the important thing here isn't so much points values and relative skill levels, as areas of functionality. Are the characters equaly capable of influencing the flow of the game? I think that's pretty important, but a supposedly equitable character generation system such as GURPS doesn't realy make any difference here. The premise of the campaign, and the choices of other characters will all have a bearing. For example a game with little combat might give two or three combat characters a dull time, but one combat character might feel very usefull on the few occasions he uses his skills.

2. Are the characters ballanced against their opposition?

Funnily enough, I think this isn't necesserily as important. After all, the premise of the game might be the human resistance fighting back against aliens with super-technology, or some such. In which case presumably they won't have a chance of standing up against their opponents in a streight fight. They'll have to find some other means of taking out the bad guys. So long as the premise is clear to the players, this shouldn't be so much of a problem.

What are the relative advantages gained by playing a low scale game? What about a high scale game?  Can game balance be maintained in high scale games?  In low scale?

I don't think scale is a real problem when it comes to game ballance, so long as the characters are competent at their main skills. In a low scale game that might mean skills for scrounging a living on the street. In a high scale game that might mean skills for summoning awesome magical energies. Whatever the characters are doing, I think they should have at least some skills that let them do it with some degree of reliability in most game circumstances. There's nothing worse than playing a special ops game where your best weapon skill is 45% (this has happened to me and people I know in convention games).

How significantly different is this from a Gamist perspective of design than a Simulationist, or a Narrativist?  I mean, clearly the Gamist perspective put balance first and foremost- what about the others?

I don't realy think it matters what the game style is. Game ballance is important because players like to feel that they can usefully participate in the game, whether in a gamist or narativist way.


Simon Hibbs

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Drew,

I'm going to back up a bit and look, widely, across some of the term's uses. I hope everyone can agree, without pain, that this is one of those words which is applied to a wide variety of activities or practices that may be independent or even contradictory. (Right ...?)

Also, the following is not intended to be definitive. I'm offering all of this up for discussion.

OVERALL ISSUES
1) Does "balance" = parity? If not, then what?

2) Are we discussing the totality of a character (Effectiveness, Resource, Metagame), or are we discussing Effectiveness only, or Effectiveness + Resource only?

3) Are we discussing "screen time" for characters at all, which has nothing to do with their abilities/oomph?

4) Are we discussing anything to do at all with players, or rather, with the people at the table? Can we talk about balance in regard to attention, respect, and input among them? I especially call attention to Logan's use of the term, Balance of Power, referring specifically to how "the buck" (where it stops) is distributed among the members of the group.

Please do not answer any of these questions from a kneejerk, "everyone knows" perspective. No one knows. The word is thrown about like a shuttlecock with little reference to these #1-4 issues. That's the current state of the art.

WITHIN GAMIST PLAY ...
Balance can refer to several things that are very different.

1) Parity of starting point, with free rein given to differing degrees of improvement after that. Basically, this means that "we all start equal" but after that, anything goes, and if A gets better than B, then that's fine.

2) The relative Effectiveness of different categories of strategy: magic vs. physical combat, for instance, or pumping more investment into quickness rather than endurance. In this sense, "balance" means that any strategy is at least potentially effective.

3) In direct contrast to #1, "balance" can also mean that everyone is subject to the same vagaries of fate (Fortune). That is, play is "balanced" if everyone has a chance to save against the Killer Death Trap. Or it's balanced because we all rolled 3d6 for Strength, regardless of what everyone individually ended up with. (Tunnels & Trolls is all about this kind of play.)

Important note: I think that the assumption that Gamist play is distinctly concerned with "balance" is very, very mistaken.

WITHIN SIMULATIONIST PLAY ...
I am forced to speak historically here, in reference to existing and widespread Simulationist approaches, not to any potential or theoretical ones. So think of Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, and Rolemaster as you read the next part. I think "balance" has been used for two very different things in this category.

1) One fascinating way that term is applied is to the Currency-based relationship among the components of a character: Effectiveness, Resource, Metagame. That's right - we're not talking about balance among characters at all, but rather balance within the interacting components of a single character. I realize that this sounds weird. Bear with me.

2) And, completely differently, "balance" is often invoked as an anti-Gamist play defense, specifically in terms of not permitting characters to change very much relative to one another, as all of them improve. This is, I think, the origin of "everyone gets a couple EPs at the end of each session" approach, as opposed to "everyone gets different EPs on the basis of individual performance."

WITHIN NARRATIVIST PLAY ...
This gets a little tricky because I can't think of a single coherent Narrativist game text in which "balance" is invoked as a design or play feature, nor any particular instance of play I've been involved in which brought the issue up. But ...

1) "Balance" might be relevant as a measure of character screen time, or perhaps weight of screen time rather than absolute length.

2) Balance of Power is relevant to all forms of play, but it strikes me as especially testy in this mode.

Best,
Ron

[Sidhain]

Considering that I'm writing a superhero game (which as a genre tends to skew to the higher end of power distribution) this is an issue I've had to specifically address.


As Ron however pointed out the issue is spotlight time. I'm going to go a step furthur and say that, primarily, thats the same across /all/ game styles. The reason why games try and make characters equal in terms of distribution of capability is frankly a way to try and enforce screen/spotlight time.

All such sonstruction of power in an game that attempts to enforce balance is inherently mechanically restrictring one to certian play elements. Certian play styles. If you don't enjoy the style the artificial construct creates you won't likely enjoy the game.

This issue comes up in the recently released supers game--Mutants and Masterminds, because it hinders a very specific villian from being constructed--who in the setting isn't really significant except in very minor circles of his "story". Yet he can't be constructed mechanically on anything M&M accepts. The character in question is the Marvel villian Bullseye--The Man who Never Misses--the fact is he /doesn't/ miss he can't failt to hit a target that isn't getting out of the way and within range. (Most heroes by the way /get/ out of the way rather than just accept being hit)

Artificial as play balance is quite a few people feel its important. The recent Buffy game tries to even the score by rewarding non-heroic pc's with more Drama Points (points to save oneself from death and to succeed at tasks) but that are earned by emotionally supporting the hero/heroine--this is a /screen/ time focused mechanic, and while artificial works a bit better (the problem is one must have screen time to spend or earn them)

All play balance that isn't about screen time is going to fail at some point with some player, and their concept for a character. So my goal in Hearts and Souls is to provide incentive/reward for the player willingly obtaining their own pc's screen time (this is essentially the Drive justification, they are drawing focus to themselves and their actions) but also by providing tools so that heroes even if disparate in power level will be likely to obtain screen time (the fact is a hero with lower attributes is given more oppurtunities to justify their final task result, thus while a higher attribute is useful, the lower one can result in more "focus" for the least powered hero, but results in a balance because the higher functioning hero's successes create their own focus.)

[Marco]

For me as a player of point-based games (think Hero or GURPS ... and the designer of one) balance has a certain meaning to me:

My take on balance in point-based-game-design: You get what you pay for.

This is a mix of Ron's simulationists balance aspects.

To further explain what I think:
If there's more than one strategy to constructing a combat-effective character and both cost the same, both should perform roughly equally (this could be as absurd as meaning choice A always wins at night and choice B always wins in the day--but on a less absurd scale it should mean that if making a strong fighter costs as much as a fast fighter they should each fight as well--or at least both have their strong points).

This bleeds into niche-protection: being a fighter-mage should make you a less effective fighter and less effective mage than the purists.

This also raises a question of combat-effect vs. non-combat effect. It's a pure judgement call on the part of the designer: how good a scientist do you have to be to play happily next to a very effective fighter? My conclusion was that you needed to be pretty darn good (GURPS made that a bit difficult without taking editic memory).

Finally, there is the question of effectiveness for the game world (being strong in Sci-Fi is probably worth less than being strong in fantasy). It was our opionion that the game rules needed some flexibility in pricing certain things for certain worlds. This is largely lacking in GURPS (the fact that STR is relatively cheap in Hero negates much of this problem but we had issues with it for use with Fantasy).

-Marco

[Bankuei]

It would also be wise to note that balance has been the fall-guy for broken social contracts.  As Ron put it, an anti-gamist defense in some cases.  More rules doesn't stop players who regularly step on the social contract, just in the same way the law doesn't prevent people from killing each other.  Balance has often been invoked to solve Social Contract issues, but cannot fix them, as its above and beyond its reach.

Chris