I tend to frequent gaming forums, mostly to find new things to use in my games, like monster cards, software, maps, and the like. One of the themes that often pops up is that of game balance. “Such-n-such class is broken” “X Power is unbalanced” type arguments seem to be the norm amongst those types of players that are constantly nitpicking the math/design of the game. I can’t imagine why anyone would feel the need to disect the game to such an extent, as I feel it takes away from the enjoyment of the game. “This feat fixes game balance, take it…”
When I first started playing D&D, it was 1st Ed. for a brief time, then 2nd Ed. AD&D. Now, I am not an expert on game design, nor do I study the skeleton of a system looking for flaws. With that being said, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that for all we know (and granted, I’m sure it’s been studied) the math in those old school games was probably as broken as anything else, unbalanced as hell, and downright silly. But you know what? Nobody ever gave a damn. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t recall a DM ever pulling out a sheet of paper and saying “Guys, they’ve erratad the fighter, Thac0 was scaling unevenly compared to every other class, so they’ve patched it”, or something to that effect…
No.
The fighter hit everything while the wizard progressed at some ridiculous rate, and only had 8 hitpoints. So what? Balance my ass.
The idea that everything has to have balance puts unnecesary pressure on the game designers, party buildups, and DM’s. “Hey DM, we want to play a party of clerics.” “Not a good idea guys, that’s not balanced, you have no strikers or defenders.”
My first DM ever was a sadistic son of a bitch who would scoff at the notion of balanced encounters. “Oh, you think you’re a bad ass fighter, take this!” And you were looking down the barrels of several dozen Gythyankis on tanks. The hell with balance. And those were the funnest games of my D&D life.
Nowadays, the minute a rule comes out, the math wizards are writing up number charts and percentages to look for the balance of it all. Look at the skill challenge fiasco in the early days of 4th Ed. Back in the day, nobody would have second guessed it. Today, a guy with too much time posts on a message board and suddenly designers have to work overtime to fix a suppossed balance issue. Back then there was no internet patching, no forums filled with math geeks screaming “skillz is teh broken!!”, we just played. And we liked it.
So what say you? What’s brought on this need for balance? Video games? WOW? Do you care? Is it really necessary to go into the workings of the game and look for flaws in the system? Why?
Game designers who may be reading this, care to share your thoughts?
I look forward to your comments.
/rant
www. Newbie DM .com 
Helmsman
April 13, 2009
Here’s the thing about “game balance” in primitive games like D&D or Palladium or any other game where the mechanics exist only to hit things. They don’t take into account little things like obviousness… or terrain, or operating conditions, or reliability. These things when detailed in a game will make it obvious why cops don’t pack around M60’s on their beat instead of crappy glocks. Or why the savages in the swamp carry around wooden shields and pokey sticks even when they might very well have mining and smelting capabilities and the technology to create full plate armour. These games can only be balanced against themselves because they lack the mechanisms that reality has to keep these otherwise imbalanced items and abilities from becoming irrationally dominant over others of similar purpose.
kaeosdad
April 13, 2009
I think the lack of time available to actually invest in this hobby of ours is the main factor. Players want to feel like they aren’t screwed over by the rules and want to enjoy playing a game.
Personally I welcome a balanced rules set because it is easier to modify. I welcome threads that attempt to figure out what they think is broken and why they think so, it could only improve not hurt the game.
On the other hand I wouldn’t want to play in a game where all the player’s or the game master was overly concerned with balance. If everyone always had an equal chance at doing something and in the end were rewarded on an equal level regardless of how well they played the game would become boring and well, not much of a game. It would be just a structured story time.
But the balance fanatics have their place in this hobby and I think it’s to figure out what’s broken, why it’s broken, how we can fix it and we can all take it for what it’s worth.
Ernest
April 13, 2009
Too much time analyzing, and too little time spent playing? BSing always preferable to actually doing ?
Ameron
April 13, 2009
I have the answer. Money! The game has been designed with profits in mind. WotC needs to make sure that any player is just as likely to play one class or race as another. This is absolutely necessary if they’re going to sell copies of “Martial Powers” or “Arcane Power.”
After all, if Fighters were CLEARLY the best, most popular and toughest class, then everyone would want to play Fighters. No one would consider playing a Wizard. This would in turn hurt overall sales of “Arcane Power.”
But if all the classes are equally balanced then players, me included, are more likely to buy all the books because I have no idea what I’m going to play next time. So I need to be ready and I need to have all the books at my fingertips.
If I’m going to play the Fighter over and over again all I need is Martial Powers and that’s it. So balanced character builds = more $$$ for WotC. Sad but true.
Thasmodious
April 13, 2009
These same kind of players have always been around. So has errata coming from screwed up or unbalanced numbers. It’s just as modern life has evolved, people, especially geeks spend a lot more time online and finding and forming communities. The math, crunch heavy RPG guys have a home and a tribe, just like anything else now. Nothing wrong with it at all, their work improves and informs RPG design. Who are any of us to tell them the manner in which they choose to indulge in the hobby is wrong or run them down. “Back in the day” plenty of people would have noticed the problems with the math from skill challenges early on as well, but they wouldn’t have had a community available that can both verify their math and is big enough to get the attention of game designers. We would have just played for years, likely, with our groups having an 80% of failing every routine skill challenge out there, most likely eventually abandoning the system. The math guys, the CO wizards, are great for RPGs.
kaeosdad
April 13, 2009
@Ernest: That’s a common misconception. You see, you need to actually get people gathered in the same location to play the game, to “over analyze” the game you just need you, yourself and your brain.
wickedmurph
April 13, 2009
I look at the concept of balance from the perspective of a board game designer. The concept of balance is essential because it gives an initial level playing field, which is then distorted by chance and skill.
Decades of interaction with the hard-core boardgaming and crpg hobbies have informed modern game designers in a way that they weren’t before, and I think that’s a really good thing.
In the various games I’ve played, I’ve encountered combinations that were… unbalanced, you might say. Things like the 2e dwarven cleric Champion kit. Cleric, with weapon specialization. Basically a fighter who can cast cleric spells. Why bother with a fighter? Or the 2nd edition Vampire rules on thrown weapons, added to Aasimites (flying blender of aggravated liquification).
If you can identify, and minimize these sorts of rule anomalies without having to make players do them independently, it’s a good thing – less people are upset about things. If players have a clear idea of what their character is good at, and trust that building a character the way they want to won’t horribly break the character (like you can do in 3e), then people have more flexibility to play, and more reasons to focus on their decisions and actions in-game, instead of at the character creation and advancement stage.
And I sort of agree, in a backhanded way, that balance is for financial reasons. You don’t buy a board game if someone tells you “play blue, they win 70% of the time”. If you balance a game, even an RPG, mechanically, it’s more attractive to people because all options are more or less equal, so you don’t have to worry about sitting around while the Champion, or Aasimite, tears apart the adventure.
newbiedm
April 13, 2009
I think my issue, and issue is too strong a word mind you, is not really with the designers and how they approach a game. That’s their job, to make the most mechanically sound game they can.
I question the need from a player’s perspective, to reverse engineer everything and try to nitpick the hell out of the game. I had never encountered that in D&D before.
Keep in mind, I was out of D&D for the most part of the 2000’s and 3rd Ed., and certainly when I did game, it wasn’t through the perspective of a blogger, forum reader, in depth gamer like I am now with 4th Ed. It was casual at best, and not consistent enough to form an opinion of the mechanics being balanced or not. I just assumed they were, like I do now.
I worry about the designers intent being affected by forum messages, and them being forced to change something due to external pressures.
What if they wanted skill challenges to be a little harder than usual? What if that was the intent for better or worse? It may be a poor choice, but what if that was the choice they made?
Maxdeth
March 3, 2010
The biggest downer in a game is when a long time player realises that their character is a weaker copy of another player’s character. They get depressed and either stop playing or kill their character. Players want to be worthwhile contributors to the adventuring group. Having a good Game Balance between character abilities fixes this.
I dont like rules changes and errata but sometimes they are necessary to stop the power players tweaking their characters beyond the reach of regular players. And yes, having one class or race better than others is a real campaign killer.
JRaven
October 20, 2010
I agree, NewbieDM. Your argument is a big point of contention between my current group and myself. Heck, it’s the argument I make to most modern gamers. I’m personally a role-player, not a roll-player, which is where that line in this argument divides. I STILL play AD&D. My friends only run 3.5 or Pathfinder. I refused to touch 3.5 for a long time, but eventually played it. I still refuse to run it.
I think with the advent of video game technology and the current trend in media marketing techniques, current gamers are being pulled into a capitalist ideology for table-topping.
What is the one thing TSR always did an awesome job of? Flavour. How many books came out that referenced our own world, its ancient cultures, its military history and mythology? Many. Those little green paper back books were great. They gave you places to find the material that they were using as a jumping off point. The Player’s Handbook for 2nd Edition gave real-world archetypes for the various classes, and also mentioned when their classes diverged from the historical/mythic archetypes (as in the cases of the Druid (page 35) and the Bard (page 41)). TSR, though interested in money, admittedly, were not marketing geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. These were guys who, long before geek became chic, had fallen in love with the romance, tragedy, heroism, and depth of the world around them and wished to experience that vicariously through their characters. These people wanted to BE Beowulf, El Cid, Ali Baba, Gawain, Roland and his knights, and many others. Though there were power-gamers and rules lawyers back then, as now, the actual game designers weren’t leaning too heavily on the mechanics side.
D&D went through many editions before 3.5 and 4th. But I think AD&D and 2nd Ed. AD&D were the last to truly approach the game from a historical/mythic perspective.
I think that with WotC gaining the rights to D&D, it was inevitable that gaming would take a turn in another direction. You take a game that was chiefly concerned with literary and historical archetypes and hand it over to a marketing giant – not to mention the fact that Hasbro is a toy company, the epitome of capitalist mentality in the entertainment market – and you suddenly have a game that no longer cares about the gamer, but about the money the gamer will spend because of how you will appeal to him.
I think one of the important things to realize here is that 2nd Edition AD&D and earlier editions were fluid and loose because it was not as heavily combat oriented a game. There were many variables that you had to just “wing.” The Rule of C ommon Sense had the day many-a-time. However, you take that game and you give it to a marketing giant, with a creative department that is used to catering to a CCG audience, you get a completely different feeling. It would make sense that the tactically-minded producers of Magic: The Gathering would design a grid-based system that relies heavily on combat and less on role-playing. All you have to do to see why this is so is visit a Magic tournament and observe quietly the masses of sweaty, vengeful, and sharp-minded logic machines that gather there. The story that goes with the game is lost in the chess-like ambition to beat your opponent in as few moves as possible. It’s all about efficiency. D&D lost its flavour because the game that lived on fantasy and real-world myth became the property of a bunch of right-brained number crunchers. They have no qualms about cutting bits of flare for the sake of streamlining a combat system. This mind is also a gamer mind (video-games, specifically the MMO’s that have been cropping up lately). You lose the real-world opportunities because common sense has been overruled by a feat or similar thing. You have to know where you are on the grid at all times to be able to take maximum advantage of the rules. WotC is a clever beast. They have so thoroughly ingrained grids and minis into their game that the eager gamer will not likely be seen without either (and lots of them).
WotC also brought gaming out of the woodwork and introduced it to a larger audience. Most people that play video games don’t care who Beowulf is, or El Cid. Heck, I’ve spoken to many who don’t even know who they are!
Personally, I believe this current trend in gaming is birthing a culture of immediate gratification and power gamers. If you want your old days back, my friend, I suggest hanging with like-minded individuals, or making your own game. There are systems out there that will cater to your aesthetic. I just ignore D&D anymore and buy up all my favourite AD&D books 🙂 If there’s a will there’s a way 🙂
I remember many times hanging around a tavern and talking to people, spending a good deal of game time role-playing (and having just as much fun as fighting). But certain skills negate the need for such interactions. Role-playing is an afterthought anymore. “Lets get the gold and kill the dragon! Who cares who rules this land!” Just roll a die to see how your character finds out where that gold is.
I get impatient with my current group because they are always on the move. They see the game as a system of points to be checked off on a to-do list. When all you care about is the treasure and your abilities, that’s all you need, a laundry-list of items and goals to accomplish. I think the answer to your post is Capitalism, to be quite honest. If people stopped to think, and decided to blend the two minds together (the role-player and the tactician), you’d get games that didn’t try to balance everything from a combat perspective. A more powerful character can easily be cut down to size by limiting him (socially, physically, economically, etc.). But that is too abstract for most Monty Haul-minded people to wrap their greedy little minds around They’d rather have the edge in combat so they can get the experience and advance faster. Gotta get that breastplate that will let you mow down your enemies with as little harm as possible. Who cares about whether your character has a family or owes allegiance to a king? That’s just fluff to give your guy a reason to be in a dungeon. The whole idea of an adventuring culture is absurd, I think. What happened to the peasant hero? Can you imagine what an adventuring society would really be like? Oh, wait… Who cares about farming when you can have a sword that breathes fire and out of the pommel and spits acid from the blad, right? As long as your enemies fall faster, who cares? Who even says that your enemies deserve to die? Is it right to bust into a dungeon and slay the beast without finding out what he’s about?
I’ve rambled enough.