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

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.

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

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

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.

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'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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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

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:

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.

----------------------------
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.
----------------------------

Player satisfaction. My holy grail of GMing. Giving the players what they want without making too easy not too obvious.

GB Steve

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.

I agree with Mike (Epoch). My favorite example from comics is the membership of Hawkeye and Thor in the Avengers. In capital-E Effectiveness terms, the Asgardian outranks the archer so far it ain't funny. But if we consider "play balance" for characters like these, taking into account Metagame (which Hawkeye would have in spades), they both are fun to play and "balanced" in that sense.

Best,
Ron

Another term/concept I often see put into the "Game Balance" bucket - Niche Protection. You know, one PC has to be "the best" at one thing, another PC "the best" at another, and so on. Effectiveness, but effectiveness as applied to a particular problem set or issue type.

Rigorously, I would want this concept kept seperate from Game Balance, but I've seen many a player who defined game balance this way.

Gordon C. Landis

Gordon,

I think that niche protection could be aptly considered an approach to game/play balance. It's not equivalent, but it's one way to get there. Interestingly, it's perhaps the earliest of the "spotlight time" mechanics, since when you segregate characters by things they're good at, they tend to naturally cede the spotlight to one another when areas in their specialty come up.

I'd say it also has another couple of goals -- keeping characters interesting (it's a frequently proposed argument among niche-protection enthusiasts that generalists are "boring,") and giving characters weaknesses (no matter how good a fighter you are in AD&D2 (strong niche protection), you'll never be able to be stealthy).

Interesting, isn't it? You could almost draw an analogy between, say, niche protection and a real-world religion -- both are proscribed methodologies and goals that are meant to address a range of possible problems. I wonder if there are other such constructs.

On 2001-09-17 13:44, Ron Edwards wrote:
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?

On 2001-09-17 19:06, GB Steve wrote:
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.

Wart said:

Or, the player decides (perfectly reasonably, considering the clues the PCs have gathered so far) that the killer is hiding at the Blue Monkey Hotel. The PC goes to the Hotel, whilst the rest of the play group goes to interview Old Man Bluemonkey. But Old Man Bluemonkey actually turns out to be the killer, so the player checking out the Hotel not only ends up being excluded from the climax from the plot, his/her action proves to be useless.

It's early so maybe I'm missing something ... In the original post it was Play Balance, Screen Time, and Influence.

The first and lasts are (to my understanding) products of the game *system.* Screen Time is a product of the GM play-style (I realize that some games may give the players the ability to 'force' screen-time but really, in most even moderately gamist or simulationist groups how often someone gets to 'do their thing' is up to the GM).

So how does that relate to balance?

I read over the Hawkeye/Thor example and concluded that it's still a GM issue. A player who makes Robin to another PC's Batman had better square it with the GM in the vast majority of situations.

So ... I'm confused: how does Screen Time fit into any of the given models?

... maybe I just stayed up too late ...
-Marco

Marco,

It's early so maybe I'm missing something ... In the original post it was Play Balance, Screen Time, and Influence.

The original post talked about Game Balance, Screen Time, and Influence. I introduced the term "Play Balance," meaning "balance in actual play," versus "game balance," meaning balance at design time.

I'd argue that, ultimately, we're always concerned with what I call Play Balance -- nobody cares how theoretically balanced your game is if the practice is that the session they're dealing with is horribly unbalanced. However, game balance can be a tool to achieve play balance.

You suggest that game balance and influence are products of system, and screen time is a product of the GM's fiat, noting that there are exceptions to that. I reply that influence is also a matter of GM fiat. It doesn't matter how games-mechanically powerful you are if your GM pitches you people who play to your weaknesses and another player's strengths -- or even that pitches problems that aren't resolvable with the games mechanics.

Eventually, everything comes down to GM fiat. Even if the game has the best game balance in the world, a particular group can make it un-play-balanced. The best that mechanics can hope to do is facilitate play balance. But that's far from a minor or easy achievment.

Does that come somewhat close to answering your question?

Ok--I got it. Now, what's the practical application of these terms?

Could there be game-mechanics that facilitate play-balance (you're right--I misunderstood play-balance for game balance)? So if a player could buy a GURPS advantage that was "Extra Mini-Scenario" meaning that when the group sat down to play his character would get an one-on-one character-specialized adventure?

Or is the idea that you could analze a dysfunctional gaming group and say "Influence is okay ... but PlayBalance is off."

Or are they just discussion terms?

-Marco

I'll humbly advance my own The Framework as an example of concrete mechanics aimed at (among other things) balancing spotlight time. Obviously, mechanics which balance influence/effectiveness are a dime a dozen.

In general, think that the terminology is useful for analysis of a session or game and determining what makes it satisfying or not-so-satisfying for a given player, and for analyzing a player, and saying what he needs. (Example: I usually prefer play-balanced scenarios. While I'm occaisionally interested in playing a secondary character, for the most part, I want my "fair share" of important decision-making/enacting.)

[ Edit to fix broken link. ]

[ This Message was edited by: Epoch on 2001-09-20 14:33 ]

This thread is awesome. Keep going! (cue 80s faux-metal soundtrack)

Best,
Ron

P.S. Yes, I know this post is totally unhelpful and quite likely offensive.

I think that Scott Knipe has come up with some interesting balancing mechanics in his new game The Hero Emergent. There is a link to it in the Indie RPG forum. For one thing, a player gets a scene that is defined as working towards and culminating in a resolution roll, and then the next player gets a scene, etc. For another Protagonism is completely shared as the players share the Hero character.

Very explicit methods to balance player enjoyment. Now if somebody would play the game and let us know how it works...

Mike