The Gaming Den

The fact that you haven't defined every term in your definition doesn't make it not a definition. I note that you also didn't define "set", "choices", or "be".

The only real balance I'm concerned about is PvP. Not to say players fighting agaisnt each other, but players solving game challenges. Depending on the game it could be beating monsters, being stealthy or whatever.

Balance basically means that on average your character will defeat game challenges as much as any other character, regardless of the choices you make during character creation. The choices you make at character creation only serve to define which of the challenges you will beat and which you will fail at.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:The only real balance I'm concerned about is PvP. Not to say players fighting agaisnt each other, but players solving game challenges. Depending on the game it could be beating monsters, being stealthy or whatever.

Balance basically means that on average your character will defeat game challenges as much as any other character, regardless of the choices you make during character creation. The choices you make at character creation only serve to define which of the challenges you will beat and which you will fail at.

That's a good definition, although I think you could still have a "balanced" game where some characters are inept at solving game challenges compared to other characters (like "Toon", maybe).

hogarth wrote:That's a good definition, although I think you could still have a "balanced" game where some characters are inept at solving game challenges compared to other characters (like "Toon", maybe).

It's important to distinguish game challenges it is important to solve in the game from game challenges that can be presented but are ultimately meaningless.

That would be PvE RC2 (Player vs. Environment, or basically the DM), and it is a part of balance to make sure that one player doesn't overshadow every other player outside of combat.

Quantumboost wrote:I think Manxome/Antistone once formalized balance as the degree to which the implementation of a game system meet the designer's (expressed or implicit) intentions. Which included "including a character/class/race in the game" as implying useful".

A rudimentary net-search didn't turn up the article though.

Close. I argued that it was the degree to which the game system remained consistent with designer intent when the players are trying to win. The article is here.

I seem to recall someone objected that this definition means that D&D is balanced with fighters sucking compared to wizards because everyone knows that's how it works, but that's not correct. This definition means that D&D can be balanced with warriors sucking compared to wizards (as in RoW) because they're an NPC class that is supposed to show up in large numbers and was never intended to be competitive with wizards. If wizards are supposed to take on groups of equal-level warriors and still win, then it would actually be an imbalance if a single warrior could go 50/50 with a wizard.

The issue I take with the definitions related to win chance is that they fail to specify the assumptions under which that probability is calculated, and attempting to fill in those assumptions usually reveals that the definition doesn't mean what we want it to mean. You can't require that the win chance be even regardless of player choices, because that would imply that even someone who is deliberately trying to lose should still have a 50% chance of beating the best player in the world, and that means that a game can't be balanced without removing all meaningful choice. Conversely, you can't call the game balanced just because optimal play results in a 50% win chance, because optimal play only considers the single best option, and that means that it's completely nonsensical to talk about fighter/wizard balance because the optimal player will always play whichever is better.

My definition says we should start with a picture of how the game is supposed to look--for example, "players should freely choose between all PC character classes (but not NPC classes), and go roughly 50/50 with level-appropriate challenges regardless of their choice"--and then check how close to that the game actually looks when played by ravenous powergamers. If some classes are never used, or if the win rate is significantly different from 50/50, then we have a balance problem. But it's not a balance problem if NPC classes have a different win rate, because they're not designed to be used in that way.

This also has the advantage that we can still talk about balance in games that were never intended to have a 50/50 win rate. For example, if you design an RPG where the PCs are supposed to win 90% of the time, we don't have to automatically call that imbalanced.

The degree to which this definition is amenable to mathematical analysis depends on what your goal is and how the system works. I wrote some general stuff about the math here and here.

I agree, I never understood the whole 3.5 wizards are so much more powerful than 3.5 fighters, sure in a duel a wizard may win, but they have some things against them, such as hit points, limited number of spells. In most of our 3.5 campaigns fighters do most of the damage.

topnob wrote:I agree, I never understood the whole 3.5 wizards are so much more powerful than 3.5 fighters, sure in a duel a wizard may win, but they have some things against them, such as hit points, limited number of spells. In most of our 3.5 campaigns fighters do most of the damage.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAY to miss the point there.

Yeah, that's like a tangent of a tangent. Whether fighters and wizards are or are not actually balanced in any given system is way off-topic, and I'm pretty sure no one else in this thread came within a mile of saying that fighters were as good as wizards in 3.5e, so I don't know who you think you're agreeing with.

topnob wrote:I agree, I never understood the whole 3.5 wizards are so much more powerful than 3.5 fighters, sure in a duel a wizard may win, but they have some things against them, such as hit points, limited number of spells. In most of our 3.5 campaigns fighters do most of the damage.

In general, dealing direct HP damage in 3.5 MEANS you're playing a crappy character. Especially if you're not doing anything else.

As a related question, in a class-based system which contains several separate minigames of equal importance, would it be necessary for all classes to be equally good at all minigames, or would it be ok for some classes to excel at specific ones in some minigame, as long as they are weaker in some other minigame?

topnob wrote:I agree, I never understood the whole 3.5 wizards are so much more powerful than 3.5 fighters, sure in a duel a wizard may win, but they have some things against them, such as hit points, limited number of spells. In most of our 3.5 campaigns fighters do most of the damage.

Seems we have our work cut out for us on this one.

That is the way DnD "balance" works for many - they assign predefined roles to characters and never leave them, they don't optimize and the DM more or less randomly uses the abilities of the NPCs/monsters. You get wizards who fireball single opponents at close ranges, clerics who take fighter levels to "fight better", rogues armed with single rapiers and druids without natural spell. Balance is determined largely by chance, or rather, by how easy it is to stumble into something effective.

So you have your iconic cleric, with at least medium armor, a shield and a warhammer or something and all the horrendous power of the class never appears, since all he does is heal the fighter and possibly take the odd hit. Even if the odd powerful spell gets cast no one notices, since in most encounters all the cleric does is heal. The basic idea of replacing the fighter with a cleric never occurs to anyone - after all someone has to do the damage, and the cleric is healing, hence not doing damage. Advanced ideas, like "do we even need damage?", "you know, combat healing actually stinks" or "why don't we replace the fighter with a summoned crocodile" aren't even on the radar.

And then someone accidentally discovers a trip fighter, an archer cleric, a battlefield control wizard or druid using only the good druid spells and wins every dumbed-down fight on his own - and henceforth this is the overpowered class. It may take years to discover another "I win" combination and even longer to truly begin to understand the game.

It's a little scary actually. I wonder where, in games or real life, I am that ignorant.

topnob wrote:I agree, I never understood the whole 3.5 wizards are so much more powerful than 3.5 fighters, sure in a duel a wizard may win, but they have some things against them, such as hit points, limited number of spells. In most of our 3.5 campaigns fighters do most of the damage.

A lot of things are based on the original design concepts taken by Gygax, reused and mostly forgotten as to why they were being used in the first place. Never the less, I am confident that “balance” was the furthest thing from his mind in design choices. The operative word (if there was one) was “utility;” the ability to be useful at some point in the game. This was balanced by some ability that was a pain in the neck at most points in the game.

This results in two types of characters, those who burn short and bright (spell casters) and those who keep on swinging for as long as they have hit points. When you had casters who only had limited big powers per day, and attackers who could do that almost non stop, you had, if not a balance a system of self limitations.

Utility was not something that was confined to a point in time; many 1E classes were horrid at low levels but were nasty at high levels (the 1E monk comes to mind). Classes advanced at different rates and at any one point the balance could be vastly different from what was before and what would most likely be later. Adding the same dimension to the racial decisions also added a massive complexity to anything that would remotely be considered “balance.”

ggroy wrote:It's a bit like finding "loopholes" in any system. The system can be anything, such as the legal system, tax laws, video games, rpg rulesets, etc ...

Not at all. Finding out polymorph layering lets you get tons of feat is using a loophole. Wishing for expensive stuff and handing the exp cost to a genie is a loophole. Using Natural Spell or stacking long duration buffs on your cleric archer is damn basic in comparison. But many people simply don't get it. I have seen paladin/monks outperform a straight wizard, simply because all that wizard did was cast damage spells. And the reason they cast damage spells was "because that's what wizards do". It isn't that they can't follow you when you walk them through the steps, they just never even try to look at anything that doesn't fit their preconceptions. They see the word "druid" and think "some healer kinda guy with some dog companion or whatever" - without ever having looked at the druid's abilities or spell list.

Murtak wrote: Not at all. Finding out polymorph layering lets you get tons of feat is using a loophole. Wishing for expensive stuff and handing the exp cost to a genie is a loophole. Using Natural Spell or stacking long duration buffs on your cleric archer is damn basic in comparison. But many people simply don't get it. I have seen paladin/monks outperform a straight wizard, simply because all that wizard did was cast damage spells. And the reason they cast damage spells was "because that's what wizards do".

Well admittedly it does feel a lot more manly to use fireballs instead of tossing rainbows and body glitter at people.

I always disliked how they made the lamest spells so awesome, especially at low levels. It's really like they did everything they could to disguise the awesome. And the price of being awesome was apparently that everyone called your wizard "Rainbow Bright" when his back was turned.

Kobajagrande wrote:As a related question, in a class-based system which contains several separate minigames of equal importance, would it be necessary for all classes to be equally good at all minigames, or would it be ok for some classes to excel at specific ones in some minigame, as long as they are weaker in some other minigame?

I'd call that another point in favor of my definition. It depends.

One can certainly create a game where the characters are supposed to switch off for different tasks, each one stealing the spotlight in turn as the party faces whatever their specialty is. If you do this, you probably want to make sure that each of the mini-games ends relatively quickly (to keep the spotlight moving), that doing badly at a single mini-game doesn't knock your character out of the larger narrative, and that there are good tools for the GM to make sure that the adventure includes an appropriate mix of challenges (so that everyone gets a fair turn, and you don't stumble on a mini-game that no one can win).

On the other hand, if you keep everyone good at all the mini-games, then there's a lot less you have to worry about in designing the mini-games and the adventures--you can throw any mixture of mini-games at the party, and you can potentially tolerate mini-game failure meaning someone dying or being left behind, because everyone has a fair chance to succeed. But character building becomes more complicated, because you need to enforce the right balance of abilities, and there are a lot more things that everyone needs to have.

So it depends what kind of game you want to make, or what parts of the design you're confident that you can do well.