Game Balance

[GB Steve]

I'm writing an article for the next issue of Places To Go People to be on the delicate issue of game balance. I'm certainly not looking for people to write this for me but I wondered if there is anything here that touches on this subject and in particular vocabulary. There is no point in multiplying terms needlessly.

I've identified the following terms:
Game Balance
The traditional defintion revolves around the PC's ability to affect the game world, typically in terms of how much damage can be dished out. My definition will involve players having equal Screen Time (q.v.).

Screen Time
How much involvement the player gets in the game.

Influence
How much a PC can influence outcomes in the game world. For example, a 1st level D&D PC in Ravenloft would have very little influence but could have in Tomb of Horrors.

There are various secondary concerns that are covered such as how noisy or pushy players are, how much time they actually require in the spotlight but on the whole, I'm assumming players want equal time and will allow others to participate. Disfunctional gaming may be looked at later.

GB Steve

[Mytholder]

I've seen Effectiveness used for "that quality which Game Balance tries to, well, balance" instead of Influence. Influence implies some sort of control over the world, whereas Effectiveness just says "you can do these things".
(Although...I can be Effective without having Influence. If I can kill anyone with a glance, I've very Effective, but unless the GM lets me see my enemy, I can't kill him. We've all played in games where no matter what our characters did, they had no real impact on the world as a whole. So, is Effectiveness a subset of Influence? Or am I Splitting Hairs in this Fit of Rampant Capitalisation?)

Either way, I don't think Screen Time should be made part of Game Balance. It's the out-of-game cognate to Game Balance, yes, but Game Balance is a concern all to itself which can be handled separately from Screen Time.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

My call on this one is that Game Balance is well served by identifying "about what" and "for what." Gareth is right in that the usual answers involve Effectiveness. I think GBSteve is suggesting taking a different view, not for REPLACING these answers for all time, but for purposes of discussing Screen Time as an issue.

In other words, "Game Balance of ..." is being completed by "... Screen Time."

Do I have that right?

Best,
Ron

[GB Steve]

There are two issues for me here.

As a player in the game, you expect to have a decent 'go'. This means getting enough time in the game to express what your PC will be doing, and having a PC that has some amount of influence on what happens in the game (effectiveness).

If you are missing either of these then you are reduced to being a spectator rather than a participant.

I'm really looking at the whole issue of player and character, I can't see how they can be separated.

This makes game balance rather more complicated, for me, than the issue of how much the PC can do. There are several reasons why you may not get enough Screen Time: separated groups, favouritism, railroading etc.

It's in a similar way to the system and background not being fully separable.

I will use the term Effectiveness from now one though.

Steve

[Mytholder]

On 2001-09-17 10:35, GB Steve wrote:
There are two issues for me here.

As a player in the game, you expect to have a decent 'go'. This means getting enough time in the game to express what your PC will be doing, and having a PC that has some amount of influence on what happens in the game (effectiveness).

If you are missing either of these then you are reduced to being a spectator rather than a participant.

I'm really looking at the whole issue of player and character, I can't see how they can be separated.

I'd separate them on the grounds that one is (largely) in the hands of the rules designer, and the other is (largely) in the hands of the GM. True, a GM can use a house rule or an in-game solution to deal with an abuse of game balance, but most game balance issues should be dealt with using the rules. SImilarly, a game might include rules relating to screen time, but such games are few and far between.

This makes game balance rather more complicated, for me, than the issue of how much the PC can do. There are several reasons why you may not get enough Screen Time: separated groups, favouritism, railroading etc.

I see your point, but I don't think Game Balance is the right term. It's too tied to rules and point balancing. How about "play balance?" as an overall term for game balance+screen time etc?

[Ron Edwards]

I'm with Gareth, on this one.

PLAY BALANCE = shared enjoyment as the priority.

I wouldn't mind seeing the older, vaguer, frankly not-useful term "game balance" being retired. It's right up there with "realism" or "just a game" in its potential for perpetual vapor-debate.

GBSteve, check out the Currency discussions earlier in the RPG Theory forum. They break "character" up into three things: Effectiveness, Resource, Metagame.

You, I, and Gareth are actually agreeing that "balance" applies to all three in some way, with the ultimate goal being a PLAYER issue. Historically, the term "balance" has only been applied to Effectiveness, and both Gareth and I are claiming that that has been a source of problems.

(Right Gar? I don't want to misapply your words)

So your proposed "screen time" is a perfectly valid, and desirable, add to the mix, as it is a Metagame aspect of Character. I suggest that you NOT use Effectiveness as the yardstick; in fact, saying that you're going to do this scares me.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

The "character currency" thread is on this forum, last post was on 7-16.

There's some more information to be found in one of Theory of X's threads with the funny "D&*>/" names. (Don't know what that was all about.)

Best,
Ron

[Wart]

Ron,

I disagree that "Effectiveness" shouldn't be used in the article. "Screen time" is a good thing, but in my view it ought to be effective screen time.

Ineffective screen time would be where the GM gives the player time to make decisions and do things, but for various reasons (the player is new to the game/GM/roleplaying itself and doesn't quite know what to expect from the game or the GM, the player has some perfectly valid ideas which lead him down blind alleys, and so on) the player's decisions don't really make that much of an impact on the plot, or don't contribute to the party's success. (To use one narrativist and one gamist example).

Effective screen time is where the GM gives the player time to make decisions and do things, and the player ends up advancing the plot, making a contribution to the party's success, or whatver.

Effective screen time is, of course, more rewarding than
ineffective screen time, but is a bugger to provide. When I
am designing scenarios for newbie roleplayers, I tend to
use pre-gen characters so that I can make sure there's a few
places in the scenario for each PC where they can make an impact on the plot/make an important contribution to the party's success.

Giving newbies effective screen time is, in my opinion, absolutely vital to securing their interest both in the scenario at hand, and in roleplaying in general. There's few things worse in roleplaying than feeling like the fifth wheel on the car (or at least, few things worse barring uncomfortable OOC relations).

This post got a little distant from game balance, as I see it, but it was a point I wanted to make.

[Ron Edwards]

Wart,

Whoa, I can see this discussion going right off the rails. Please, everyone has to back up and try to see what Gareth and I are saying, not what seems "obvious" that we're saying.

It's a matter of Effectiveness already having a very, very specific meaning at the Forge. We aren't talking about "effectiveness" in some kind of intuitive sense.

RON'S CATEGORIES OF CHARACTER COMPONENTS
1) Effectiveness = stuff on the sheet that indicates the character's spheres of competence, degrees of competence, probabilities of success, and that sort of thing.

2) Resource = hit points, magic points, fatigue points, money, or anything else that gets used up as a feature of in-game-world activity.

3) Metagame = Story Points, "re-roll" rights, back-story, connections, enemies, and any other material that constitutes "agreements" about what the player can do or expect.

And Currency indicates any means of trading within or among these categories as a feature of making a character, especially considering any weird exchange rates (drop DEX by 1 point, get 3 points of Strength, e.g.).

So if we're talking about "balance," the first thing to do is check out all three aspects of a character, NOT just the stuff under Effectiveness (which is the usual way). That's all Gareth and I are saying.

GBSteve is saying it too, by looking at a feature of play that is NOT classified under Effectiveness, "screen time."

Wart, I suggest that you are calling for a good look at what "screen time" may be. Perhaps you, like me, have suffered too many sessions in which my PC was PRESENT but PREVENTED FROM ACTION. I, like you, would not call that "screen time" at all. Is that more or less a good paraphrase of your point?

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

As I see it, Ron and Wart, you both are saying the same thing. The goal is for the player to have fun by ensuring that he has some sort of creative or manipulative influence in the game. This is usually (but not necessarily) brought about by the player's character being present at the action of the game, and being able to make some sort of relevant addition to the game in some sort of manner. For a gamist, this addition is in terms of Effectiveness in that he desires for his character to be a tool to overcome the obstacles presented. For a simulationist, the addition is playing a role as a part of the simulation, for a narrativist it is the ability to help propel the story forward.

I've argued this for a while. While it is often more fun for most simulationists and narrativists to have "Effective" characters, it is more important that they just have the opportunity to contribute somehow, usually in that their character gets to be a protagonist at least part of the time. If this requires Effectiveness for the genre in question (say superheroes) then a lot of Effectiveness is important. But only in Gamist games is it really important that Effectiveness be Balanced, as that is a goal from the outset, that the game be a fair test of your character creation and playing abilities.

If a GM of a S or N game can cause a player's printed Effectiveness to be useless (which he patently can) then why would it be at all important for the characters to have the same Effectiveness? Won't the requirements of the story or simulation work to make it so that certain players will have characters more important to the ongoing situation or plot (note in a gamist game the GM's job is to level this field)? Isn't it just more important that there be some way in which one character's protagonism can be balanced with the others? In fact, it seems perfectly reasonable that players play charcters with very little Effectiveness, just so long as they play some integral role in the simulation or story. Metagame, for instance, can often fill this role.

For this reason I like Steve's term Screen Time, and take it to mean time that the character is present and playable. His Balance then is meant to imply Effectiveness I think, but should also include anything that makes the character a protagonist (including both GM intervention and game mechanics). In addition, though, in an analysis of what the game does to make it so that the player is an interested participant should be included any sort of power that the player has. For example, directorial power. This may allow a player to make additions to the game that have nothing to do with his character, yet are fun to introduce. Again, this is almost the definition of metagame power.

I hope I have added to and not subtracted from the understanding of this subject.

Mike Holmes

[Epoch]

This is a subject I've spent some amount of time on.

I've traditionally differentiated "game balance" from "play balance."

I call a session play balanced if all of the players have equal opportunity to perform game actions which are of equal impact on each other and the game as a whole.  That's neither a pure effectiveness (lower-case "e") comparison nor a pure screen-time comparison.  For example, suppose that character A is the prophecied farm-boy who's going to take down the evil empire, and characters B-D are the veteran adventurers who've taken character A under their wing.  Character A may be more effective, in that he's essential to the group's eventual success, which none of the other characters are.  But until that time when he's enormously effective, character A doesn't get to do much -- he's high effectiveness, low screen-time.  The other characters are the reverse.  The session is not play-balanced.

"Game balance" is what I refer to the mechanical, design-time process of attempting to facilitate play-balance.  If you make a game game-balanced, you try to envision the archetypical game scenario, and set up the game to assure equal effectiveness of the players in that scenario.  You also may include screen-time mechanics.  People tend to be contemptuous of game balance because they've realized, as RPG's tend to move away from highly archetypical scenario, that it doesn't necessarily create play balance.  (I, however, think that game balance is still very important in ensuring long-term play balance over the course of a campaign).

[Mike Holmes]

I very much agree with you Mike. The only place where I'd clarify my opinion is that in stating that Game Balance is mechanics that are important in making Play Balance work, that Game Balance includes not just Effectiveness, but Metagame as well. So, you can have players of differeing "Power" levels, and still have a balance brought about by rules. This is exactly what your The Framework does. And also the driving concept in essence behind the game that Ralph Mazza (AKA Valamir) and I are creating. Games like The Pool, and Wyrd adress these things in a similar fashion, as well.

Mike

[Epoch]

Mike,

Full agreement.  It's pretty recent that there have been mechanics which have sought to balance spotlight time, but they do exist.

I think that it's very likely that we'll shortly discover that such mechanics aren't much better at balancing spotlight time than GURPS is at balancing character effectiveness.  :razz:

[GB Steve]

All very interesting stuff.

The reason why I'm loathe to include Effectiveness in my idea of Game Balance through Equal Screen time is because PCs may have involvement in the game but be secondary to the outcomes but still enjoy themselves.

I'm thinking in particular of the type of game like Pendragon where one player might play a squire to a Knight PC. His time is spent looking out for the Knight, dealing with underlings, finding accomodation and helping his Lord with the ladies whilst getting laid by 3 times more by servant girls than his Lord who has to abide by some dumb laws of chivalry. I have played such PCs and had a blast.

(Danger - Advert - there's a nice article by Scott Lynch in the latest www.ptgptb.org about playing useless PCs)

Such PCs are often totally ineffective (I've played an RQ PC who had negative skills due to atrocious modifiers) but offer roleplaying challenges. I don't want to exlcude something I enjoy.

I get a bit muddled from here, I'm just thinking out loud so ignore if it's too unstructured.

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Obviously we are touching on GNS here. I like to play characters and I'm not so worried about 'how to get stuff and win'. Actor stance obviously but where in GNS to situate this is harder. For me S doesn't come into how I play the game, that is about what the system does. By this token, it does influence the kind of things my PC can do but generally there is scope enough.

It could be G in the sense that I want to achieve something, that is playing a good character but that doesn't really sit well with me as I'm not really competing with anyone else nor looking for them for approval.

N is not right either. The story is important, in as much as my PC contributes as a character but we could spend all night roleplaying buying turnips (and this could easily happen in DE) without accomplishing anything, writing any more story but still have fun.

So I haven't really gone anywhere here except once again to express my dissatisfaction with GNS. But this is partly why I'm focussing on something else, player satisfaction.
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Player satisfaction. My holy grail of GMing. Giving the players what they want without making too easy not too obvious.

GB Steve

[Epoch]

My personal feeling about this is that it's useful to differentiate Play Balance (or Game Balance, using Steve's definition of the term) from "The Ultimate Holy Grail Which Is That Everyone Has a Goddamned Great Time."

That's why I do include effectiveness in Play Balance.  Because that's, well, balance.  Some people may not require balance in order to Have a Goddamned Great Time.  My experience is that most people do -- that very few players are satisfied with doing things which are consistently unimportant to the rest of the players.

Now, the effectiveness of play balanced characters may not be "traditional" RPG balance.  For example, if five players are playing powerful adventurers from a far-off land, capable of killing any five normal people in a sword fight, and magical feats beyond the ken of mortal men, and one player is playing a ten-year-old street urchin, it's entirely possible to play-balance them.  If the street urchin has, for example, contacts that none of the adventurers have, and is consistantly required to use his local area knowledge and contacts to get things done that the rest of the players can't do with their other skills, and the urchin gets spotlight time while doing it, then it's entirely likely that the game is play-balanced.