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-

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.

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

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-

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.

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?

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-

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.

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.


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

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.

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-

MisterPoppet wrote: 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 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-

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.

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

MisterPoppet: In terms of my point, it doesn't really matter if D&D is missbalanced (in your opinion). The idea is that if you read a design through, there should be no clear winning strategy leaping out at you. If D&D fails in this regard, it was a bad example to bring up and should be forgotten about.

Just think about it: No clear strategy from just reading the book.

PS: It's off topic, but I often find my friends can missinterpret a rule to their benefit, and in their excitement not double check that interpretation. I have to wonder if your friend is similar.

ffilz wrote: 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.

I have some thoughts on costing attributes (which is the kind of balance Tony is refering to and, I think, a reasonable way to look at the question).

Firstly, some of the values of having a 'correct cost' for an attribute (the points are a useful measure of its utility or effectivness in the game) are:

1. Niche protection (Justin hits this with his 'each class is the best in the game at its shtick). I don't like it when whatever my character does is easily co-opted by someone else for a handful of points.

2. Variance in characters: even if the game revolves around "killing things" then it's nice to have there be several competing styles of doing that. Being able to mechanically distinguish a knight from a barbarian from a sword-saint from a whatever is (IMO) good for party depth. Having a number of options whose prices seem fair to the players and having no set of abilities always overshadow another will help players who want to distinguish their characters within a niche.

For my project, I looked at a few different things (most of these were geared towards Supers-genre but, I think, apply anywhere).

1. Point-Partitioning: if you use a point-buy system consider having different kinds of points for different sets of attributes. Although this is ugly in one respect (two or more different kinds of points to keep track of) it is very powerful in terms of elegantly separating things that are different to value against each other.

You might have 'combat points' and 'other points' in a hack-and-slash game which would ensure that everyone had at least some of both. That's a crude example, of course.

Consider GURPS Supers: an average super gets like 500pts. Each point of Strong Will costs 4pts for +1 to the roll (rolls going from 3-18 on 3d6, starting at 10). It's trivially easy (20pts) to get a Will roll so high that rolling is *almost* academic. A little more expensive (32pts) to get one that *is* always a success under normal circumstances. The cost for super-powers is usually 60-100pts and spending a fraction of that so you'll never fail a Will roll is extremely cheap.

If you separate attribute points from super-power points you resolve this problem making characters who distinguish themselves by strength of will more meaningful.

2. Diminishing Returns: In most games there's an 'average' level of effectivness that's expected. If you're above it, that's usually okay--if you're *way* above it, however, that may create problems (if only by making some mechanical checks unnecessary).

It was my observation that play was the best when players were very good at what they did but not absolute. In order to 'achieve that balance' I think diminishing returns in cost-levels is a useful concept. Basically, make each 'point' of something cost more than the last (or just have the cost increase above some level).

This allows characters to breach the 'limits' without 'overpowering the game.' (note: this terminology is somewhat munchkiny--I have no philosophical problem with powerful or effective characters. It's simply my observation that some of the players I liked playing with wanted the freedom to make the most cost effective characters the could and still have the system, as written support a dramatic challenge for them).

It also has the advantage that a player who 'really cares' (and buys into the diminishing returns territory) will mechanically exceed the character who doesn't--but should not create too wide a disparity (Armor guy is tougher than Energy Dude but not so much so that the two can't fight along side against the same basic level of foes).

3. Knowing what to make cheap: I think that paying extra points for things that are 'rare' or 'cool' is a mistake--point costs should, IMO, be based on effectivness in game-mechanics terms. If things that are 'cool' aren't getting *expressed* in game-mechanics terms then perhaps there's a focus problem with the mechanics.

One example is flight that can carry other people in a wind vortex: yeah, that's 'much better than normal flight'--but if a strong, flying character can fly at top speed with as many people as he can carry or can hang on, then it's just "more convinent." I wouldn't charge much more for that.

Another is GURPS 3rd Ed Claws. Lotta people wanted them, but priced at about 1/3rd your standard starting points and mechanically no better than a carried sword most people I knew deemed them simply not worth it. A bidding system we played with placed them at 4pts, IIRC 1/10th their listed cost. Most people I knew who paid the listed price considered themselves to be paying what we called a 'coolness tax'--extra points because retractable claws were 'cool.'

These are some of the guiding principles I used when making a point-buy system for my project.

-Marco

Ok first off, I'm not DM. Someone has been is DM. I'm DMing tomorrow.

I did get the point. I know what you're saying. However, I'm saying that so far there is no significant argument with the barbarian. We can argue that this and that is better. Or that these are good in that situation, but it really isn't possible in the case of the barbarian. He can live in the wild, and that's about it. Even with his high amount of life, he stills dies first because he's so easily hit. A cleric isn't always going to be there, you can't rely on it. In our opinion he is useless. He doesn't have anything to make up for the lack of armor (which he needs). I think that if you raised the rage power (or raised it sooner) and gave him an alternative way of dodging attacks. He would be balanced. But this is my opinion, I've studied it as I see fit.

I never said that a winning strategy should pop out at me. My D&D group has studied hard to discover methods of making useful characters. It took my brother 4 months of reading and rereading to find the rangers true potential. We've been working on a lot of "not-easily-high-power" classes. So far, we've found something for everyone, except the barbarians. We're just dumbfounded at how it's so locked into submission.

But you should all remember, this is my opinion. Just because it clashes with yours doesn't mean that it's wrong. It's just different. Like I said, if you can make the barbar useful, I'd like to know. ::sigh::

-Poppet-

MisterPoppet wrote:
I did get the point. I know what you're saying. However, I'm saying that so far there is no significant argument with the barbarian. We can argue that this and that is better. Or that these are good in that situation, but it really isn't possible in the case of the barbarian. He can live in the wild, and that's about it. Even with his high amount of life, he stills dies first because he's so easily hit. A cleric isn't always going to be there, you can't rely on it. In our opinion he is useless. He doesn't have anything to make up for the lack of armor (which he needs). I think that if you raised the rage power (or raised it sooner) and gave him an alternative way of dodging attacks. He would be balanced. But this is my opinion, I've studied it as I see fit.

There ya go! Someone with some sense! I asked to be proved incorrect, and he's the only one that actually did so. You see, this is not my campaign. This is someone else's. It's a campaign setting that they've been using forever (Greyhawk). The major problem is that they don't RP nearly enough. Everything is about battle. And if you aren't a major magic user, you're useless unless you can run in and fight head on. That's the way our DM runs stuff. It's also the reason I volunteered to DM tomorrow. I don't play physical characters, I play magic folks. We use minis, but they don't move much. They're used as very basic representations of battle.

No, this has nothing to do with what I was asking about earlier. He just brought it up as a balancing point (even though I'm making this system to ween them off of D&D). I stated my opinions as I have seen them in the games I've played. And he got all offensive without any info to back himself up. He started with some info, but he kind of studdered on the info. I then, at the spurt of the moment, figured that this would be an opportunity to find out how to balance the barbar with the other classes. You are the one who accomplished this. You have proved me wrong (my second objective in this post). Thank you.

Oddly enough, the person in my group that plays barbarians a lot is named Ben. Hmm... I shall tell them of these barbar traits.

-Poppet-

Ok, back to topic...

Actually, Marco, I too am trying to keep the giudelines in mind. It needs to be this way for my group. They like to exploit rules very well.

-Poppet-

MisterPoppet wrote: There ya go! Someone with some sense! I asked to be proved incorrect, and he's the only one that actually did so.

MisterPoppet wrote:
You see, this is not my campaign. This is someone else's. It's a campaign setting that they've been using forever (Greyhawk). The major problem is that they don't RP nearly enough. Everything is about battle. And if you aren't a major magic user, you're useless unless you can run in and fight head on. That's the way our DM runs stuff. It's also the reason I volunteered to DM tomorrow. I don't play physical characters, I play magic folks. We use minis, but they don't move much. They're used as very basic representations of battle.

No, this has nothing to do with what I was asking about earlier. He just brought it up as a balancing point (even though I'm making this system to ween them off of D&D).

...

They like to exploit rules very well.

I'm not speaking of sense in that way. I'm talking about how they say that the barbarian is good but don't really say why (other than it's life and rage, which doesn't amount to much in my group).

I'm not weening them off D&D to change their RP habits, I'm doing it because they play it every other day and it's driving me crazygonuts. Their RP habits cannot be changed, but I know that I can at least get them to play something else. At least I'll try.

I've already tried to find a another group. It's really hard to do though when you live in the middle of nowhere and already know the entire nerd population (yes, I've tried the non-nerds and geeks).

Nevermind on the whole thing. At least they'll be happy about the whole barbarian thing.

-Poppet-