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So, spinning off from the "Balance", "Fairness" ? thread, I thought I'd continue with a point I was fumbling toward at the end there. Before I get started, I want to say that this is a point that's very much entrenched in the "traditional" view of RPGs, particularly as it pertains to that more-or-less awkward Sim/Gam hybrid that was, I suspect, how many of us got into RPGs. So forgive me if I talk like I'm ignorant of the diversity of modern RPG design; what I have to say applies less, I think, to a lot of modern indie games, which often don't handle character creation in the way a lot of games concerned with "balance" do.

So then. Daniel got the ball rolling on the balance question, and way way back when it was originally raised, I think he was discussing it in terms of a forthcoming game. I could be wrong about this. But it got me thinking about the role that balance plays in system design, and I think that balance in system design may, to some extent, be a red herring.

Now when I say "balance" I'm talking very much just about character effectiveness -- the idea that Player A, choosing among the available character options (classes, Feats, Disciplines, superpowers, whatever), will have a roughly equal chance of making an equally effective character to Player B, doing the same thing.

But who decides what player options are effective? At the risk of sounding bitter, I'll take an example that's happened to me many's the time: building a Vampire character with a bunch of points in Finance. If skill points were real, putting them into Finance would be roughly equivalent to using them to light a cigar or something. You will, 99% of the time, never see any benefit from them. To me, though, it's the "99% of the time" that's interesting. Why is Finance useless most of the time? Well, it's for two reasons.

Firstly, in most traditional RPG structures, the GM takes a widish range of character creation options that apply to a very large gameworld and then narrows the campaign down to a smaller subset of that. A Vampire game about hacking through the trackless jungles of Central America in search of ancients to diablerize and one about ruthless intrigue in Silicon Valley boardrooms will obviously put different emphasis on different abilities, but both will have Finance and Survival on the character sheet, although in one case or the other one of the skills will be as useful as tits on a boar hog. So there's one thing: in most traditional RPGs, the GM has a huge deal of say in how effectiveness your effectiveness is at a campaign level -- and is expected to have.

Secondly, as if that weren't enough, a lot of character effectiveness in your standard RPG design is "mother may I," to borrow a phrase from Mike Mearls. Even if your character has the relevant skill, and the situation fits it, it's usually the GM who calls for the rolls, and there's a grand tradition of handling certain areas of character effectiveness through unwritten systems -- as any 98 pound weakling who's ever put lots of points into Intimidation in a LARP will know.

Overall, then, I think it's very hard to predict, at the stage of writing the rulebook for a traditional "it's a great big world, do your thing" game, exactly what's going to be effective and therefore what constitutes balance. I suggest, although it's just a hunch, that the more you can tell in advance what a session of your game is going to look like -- that is, the more Situation is hardwired into the design -- the better you can predict this kind of thing.

So what's to be done? I've always kind of handled this at the campaign level by saying "yeah, don't bother putting any points into Swim: if it ever comes up we'll just roll Body or something," and I suspect that this -- heavy GM interference in character creation -- is exactly how most Sim type GMs handle this. Some gamebooks are very upfront about this (my perennial example being UA 2nd ed). So maybe a big wodge of advice to the GM is the way to handle this. I would suggest more than Orkworld, which I always thought drew attention to the problem, gave the GM a license to feel smug about his approach to it, but didn't really offer anything constructive.

Anyway, I don't particularly have a recommendation here: I'm perfectly happy establishing very firm guidelines at character creation, and I'm not at all bothered by the gamebooks I buy being less RPGs and more kits to make RPGs out of. But from a design perspective, I think this makes balance kind of a blind alley unless you have a very clear idea what's going to happen in a session. I note that a lot of indie games have this trait, their designs being "seated in the anticipated session," to quote Malcolm Sheppard.

I could be wrong. What do you guys think?

First:  Is your discussion of balance purely in terms of character creation (not in terms of resolution or character development) a deliberate one?  Do you want to discuss these questions in that context, or more broadly?

Heya,

QuoteNow when I say "balance" I'm talking very much just about character effectiveness -- the idea that Player A, choosing among the available character options (classes, Feats, Disciplines, superpowers, whatever), will have a roughly equal chance of making an equally effective character to Player B, doing the same thing.

To be clear, we are talking about balance of characters not any other kind of balance (such as balance of power).

The main problem I see that you are having is how you are defining "Efectiveness."  What do you mean by that?  As I stated in previous threads, the best way IMHO to define character effectiveness is how well that character can engage the Creative Agenda for that particular game and/or group.  

Since you wanted to specifically talk about GAM/SIM type games, I'll discuss only those and leave Nar out for now.  In a gamist CA, a character prevents the player from Stepping Up, is a character that is unbalanced (also called weak, underpowered, gimped, whatever).  If the character prevents all the other players from Stepping UP it is also imbalanced (often termed overpowered, uber, godlike, broken, etc.).  In Sim, if the character is out of flavor with whatever is being Dreamed up and especially if it allows some unfair advantage or disadvantage, the character is out of balance and unhealthy for the game and group.

In each CA there are different arenas for competition or excellence.  Each is legitimate, but each is also differnent.  In your example, what I am seing is dysfunction (correct me if I'm wrong guys).  You have a player who is wanting to engage in one of the Arenas of a CA while the group and/or GM is wanting to engage in another.  You have clashing CAs and therefore less fun.

Anecdotal evidence is not always most useful when discussing something like balance of character as a design goal.  Every individual group will engage the CA of the game differently.  And getting bogged down in the minute details of things like skill lists and superpower rankings is really just a form of min-maxing IMO.

So what I'd like to see is what you feel an "effective character" is and how that relates to the Big Model, Creative Agendas, or design theory. :)

Peace,

-Troy

Hey guys -- I'll address both questions together, since I think they're related.

Tony: no, it's not deliberate that I decided to discuss balance in character creation except that it was the original context of the discussion and, I think, probably the balance-related area people experience most, since more characters are created than are advanced. But I'd be interested in seeing how balance issues come up in other areas.

Troy:

QuoteYou have a player who is wanting to engage in one of the Arenas of a CA while the group and/or GM is wanting to engage in another. You have clashing CAs and therefore less fun.

I think that's not clashing CAs, per se, since it's definitely possible that both GM and player are invested in the same CA (you can definitely see this happening in a "realist" Sim-game, right? "I never get the chance to use my Finance skill." "Well, a banker in the heart of the Amazon *wouldn't.*" "But it sucks to play a banker in the heart of the Amazon!"). It's a screwup at a much lower level of the model, I think Ephemera. I think it's a common consequence of game texts that marry system to Setting rather than Situation, if that makes sense, and don't provide direction on how to adjust.

About effectiveness: I don't think "effectiveness" is how well the player can engage with the CA, although I talked about that in the earlier thread. In this case, I'm using it as per the Glossary:

QuoteA Character Component: quantities or terms which are directly used to determine the success or extent of a character's actions during play.

Balance traditionally refers to character components (and not just effectiveness necessarily; I was kind of conflating them there, it now seems), and is usually dismissed at the Forge as the vaguest of red herrings. I agree, really, but I'm trying to get a handle on why I agree.

Mind you, I don't think that this discussion really needs to take place within GNS at all, nor that it needs to exclude Narrativism, although I think it'll tend to exclude all but the most Vanilla or Vanilla Narrativism.

Quote
Anecdotal evidence is not always most useful when discussing something like balance of character as a design goal. Every individual group will engage the CA of the game differently. And getting bogged down in the minute details of things like skill lists and superpower rankings is really just a form of min-maxing IMO.  

Well, "different groups will tend to play differently" is actually my big argument against attempts to enforce game balance at the rulebook level, yeah. I just don't think it really has anything to do with CA. Additionally, I don't have anything against min-maxing. In some games it's half the fun.

But it's very vulnerable to issues of varying effectiveness balance.

Quote from: James Hollowayit's very hard to predict, at the stage of writing the rulebook for a traditional "it's a great big world, do your thing" game, exactly what's going to be effective .... it's a common consequence of game texts that marry system to Setting rather than Situation, if that makes sense, and don't provide direction on how to adjust.

I had to read this twice before I got it, and then I thought: Hell yeah! You've nailed something, here. Traditionally games were built around a setting: You'd have The Fantasy Game where you could do fighting, political intrigue, or exploration in a high-fantasy world; and you'd have a separate Cyberpunk Game to do fighting, political intrigue, or exploration in a near-future world; and so on; and heaven help you if you optimized your high-fantasy character for intrigue and discovered, whoops, this campaign is really about killin' stuff. Whereas if you took the My Life With Master approach -- here you have a very specific situation, so you know exactly what your character needs to do, and you can throw it into almost any setting from ancient Egypt to cyberpunk as you see fit -- it becomes much easier to know what the heck play is really going to involve. Which has the beneficial side effect of allowing you to design characters for better play balance, but that's just one of many good things such clarity allows.

And so I just said what James said, only three times as lengthily.

But here's an original idea, although it's not entirely mine -- Ben Lehman (Polaris) mentioned it to me in the car on the way back from a game a few weeks ago:

Traditionally games tend put a "price" on abilities that attempts to capture how useful they are: If I'm going to use Skill X twice as often as Skill Y, Skill X should cost twice as much as Skill Y, etc. But this runs into the problem James noted of "the banker in the jungle": How do you know, in advance, how often Skill X really will be useful?

So (here's Ben's point, made about my own game design but massively generalized): Why not turn this around? Why not make the "price" of an ability dictate how often it comes up? If I paid 1 point per level of Finance Skill, maybe I get to use it in one scene a session; if I paid 5 points, I get to use it in five scenes -- and it's a Social Contract issue to make sure that makes some kind of sense. In other words, the price of an ability is no longer an estimate of its potential value, but a game-mechanical factor that controls scene framing.

And it's late, and that may make sense to nobody but me.

That makes perfect sense to me.

"These two Amazonian warrior tribes are feuding because one needs highest quality ropes to build a network of bridges to ease travel, while another has the rope, and doesn't take kindly to the notion that they should just give it away so that everyone can profit from it.  By God, Jesby, it's a good thing you're here... the only way to make peace is to introduce these savages to the concept of venture capital immediately!"

It would be a terrific way to help direct the game-master (if any) in creating challenges, too.  You look at the skills of the characters, figure out which ones haven't yet been used as often as their objective importance justifies, and make a challenge involving those.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg
And so I just said what James said, only three times as lengthily.

But much more clearly.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg
So (here's Ben's point, made about my own game design but massively generalized): Why not turn this around? Why not make the "price" of an ability dictate how often it comes up? If I paid 1 point per level of Finance Skill, maybe I get to use it in one scene a session; if I paid 5 points, I get to use it in five scenes -- and it's a Social Contract issue to make sure that makes some kind of sense. In other words, the price of an ability is no longer an estimate of its potential value, but a game-mechanical factor that controls scene framing.

And it's late, and that may make sense to nobody but me.

See, I was about to mention that my idea was initially to price abilities on the sliding scale, allowing the GM or player consensus or whatever to set little dials for skill "cost" based on expected utility -- which would require complete transparency, which some groups wouldn't go for.

But leave it to Forge posters to come up with a crazy, innovative way to handle the same problem, and to make it much more elegant than mine.

One small thing, though: allowing skill cost to determine frequency of use would make Daniel's group (and maybe half the gamers I know) howl like scalded cats: whither in-game causality?!

Quote from: James HollowayOne small thing, though: allowing skill cost to determine frequency of use would make Daniel's group (and maybe half the gamers I know) howl like scalded cats: whither in-game causality?!

Correct, we would not accept this.  

What I am doing with my system is assigning a point value to each skill so that the most useful skills are very expensive and the weaker ones are cheap.  (I know, "how do you decide what's useful and what's weak?")  
But, GMs may ignore this point system if they wish at the time of char. creation.

I like the cost-dictates-frequency approach, but I have an alternate proposition: 1 situation = 1 game.

'Amazon Survival' can be  a game in its own right.  There are certain charectaristics relevant to 'Amazon Survival', but which haver little in common with those required by the prior situation, 'Silicon Valley Finance'.

When we were playing the Silicon Valley game, therefore, we *expressed* our characters in terms of financial acumen etc.  When we play the Amazon game, we express our character in relevant terms, such as 'Wield Machette' and 'Save vs. Malaria'.

The key sense here is the EXPRESSION of the character, rather than their definition, through attributes.  If we see attributes as being properties of thr game, rather than properties of the character, then we can switch one character in and out of various reprasentative systems.  Then, any game should be able to acoomodate any character on all the appropriate terms.

Quote from: Domhnall(I know, "how do you decide what's useful and what's weak?")  

Well, if categories exist for "useful" and "weak," just make sure to provide some guidance on how to adjust the levels to fit a particular campaign and Bob's your uncle. Don't just say "adjust these as you see fit," but explain roughly what proportion should be of what cost, etc.

Quote from: contracyleI like the cost-dictates-frequency approach, but I have an alternate proposition: 1 situation = 1 game.

I think this is very much the approach of games like MLWM, DitV, etc. They're games firmly grounded in the situation. I'm not sure it's a useful hard and fast rule, necessarily, although I can see it as a sort of theoretical ideal.

Looking at my last post, it seems like I didn't really grasp Gareth's point clearly enough. That sounds interesting, too, and is done in a slightly different way whenever someone converts a campaign over from one system to another (an idea that sounds really weird in an age of directed design, doesn't it? Can you imagine trying to convert your kill puppies for satan game to another system? Why would you?). But this idea is a little more weird and compelling. It really requires thinking differently about the relationship between the character as an element of the SIS and the character sheet as a play document.

You crazy kids!

A lot of people don't WANT a game where one situation is one game... they want to see their characters move from one set of challenges to the next, possibly dealing with entirely new problems from a completely different perspective, as they go along.

I'll use DnD because it's the only game I know that has a quantified "encounter" system... that is, that combat scenes, puzzle scenes, and social scenes are all dealt with under one mechanic...

One of the basic truisms of being a good DM is that if a player gives his character an ability, it is a fairly good first assumption that he wants to see that ability come up in play (there are exceptions to this, but they are imho rare).  After a gaming group makes up their characters, I will gather them up and look at their skill and ability choices.

"Okay, both the party rogue and the cleric took Diplomacy skill, okay, need some negotiation scenes... and the wizard has change self on his spell list, not to mention cross-class skill in disguise, clearly he wants to go undercover somewhere... hm, a monk instead of a fighter, that's an unusual choice..."  And I write a first adventure about sneaking into a wizard's guildhall to make contact with a spy who's trapped in the cellars.

Really, I'm surprised when I hear that people DON'T do this.

Now game design could more explicitly handle this.

Since I'm a radioactive fanboy for Capes right now, I'll use it as an example... Let's say that after you've set up some characters, each character's powers and styles are written down on slips of paper and dropped into a hat.   When it's time to frame a new scene, two slips of paper are drawn from the hat, and the scene framer is challenged to somehow incorporate an element of those powers in the scene he frames... perhaps he gets a story token if he manages it.  An example would be, if "flight" and "super strength" are highlighted, then the setting would be a cargo jet, in flight.

Quote from: James HollowayWell, if categories exist for "useful" and "weak," just make sure to provide some guidance on how to adjust the levels to fit a particular campaign and Bob's your uncle. Don't just say "adjust these as you see fit," but explain roughly what proportion should be of what cost, etc.

BESM 2e explicitly does this.  The skill cost chart lists campaign themes across the top ("transforming robots", "magical girl", "teen drama") and skills down the side, and cross-references that to a skill cost.  "Repair machines" costs 4 in a transforming robots game, whereas only 1 in teen drama, where 'cooking' costs 4.

Quote from: VaxalonA lot of people don't WANT a game where one situation is one game... they want to see their characters move from one set of challenges to the next, possibly dealing with entirely new problems from a completely different perspective, as they go along.

Yeah, that's what I thought, too, but check out what Gareth's actually saying: same characters, different situation, different system. How's that for weird?

As for planning scenarios based on character creation interpreted as a statement of player desires, you're right. That's exactly what most people do. That's what I meant about balance being handled in 99% of all functional games at a GM/campaign level and therefore being kind of a non-issue in system design. But this can lead to something Daniel has complained about, which is that the GM can easily be forced into violating setting plausibility in order to make otherwise weak characters effective.

If that's a big concern for you (it's not really for me, personally) I think the key lies in setting design or in a very focused character creation process. Me, I'm happy tweaking things for individual campaign purposes. I actually kind of enjoy it.

(Aside: God, I hate it when people refer to people by RL name, and online handles are the only ones displayed.  I hate having to figure out who people are referring to.  But that's a personal peeve.  In this case, it was obvious.)

Having tried, on several occasions, to transfer a character from one system to another, I have always found that they didn't really feel like the same character after the job was done.  It's like when they switch actors in Doctor Who... he's only the same guy in one sense of the word.

I'm not sure I'd find the style of play that contracycle suggests comfortable... not without seeing how it would be handled on a more specific level.

I mean... one of the things that defines a person, is the sum of his memories and experiences, things that show up on the character sheet as skills and abilites.  To change those around from one game session to the next... it doesn't seem to me that it would be the same character.

Those exceptions I mentioned?  They're important here.  

Let's say I'm making a character for DnD.  He's an ex-marine... a fighter trained to fight aboard ship.  I give him a few cross-class ranks in perform (sea chanties)... not because I want for an adventure to, at some point, revolve around that ability, but because it's just something he might know, and it helps define the character.