Game Balance, D&D, and the Future

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

If we look at modern games such as Starcraft II , or Street Fighter we'll notice that a great deal of attention has been paid to balance. The developers show signs of actually understanding the intricacies of the games that they make. Contrarily, balance this against D&D. The game itself is broken. It's not balanced. And, little serious work (if any) was employed in making it balanced.

One argument I've heard in the past is that D&D is a cooperative game and thus interparty balance is not the most important.

However, when we think about it. A lot of stories are entertaining at the Gaming Den and elsewhere because they involve a strong dissonance between the game as depicted by the game developers and the game as it actually is, much to the shock, and often hilarious anger that ensues from expectations being broken.

Although D&D is primarily a cooperative game, it is also a competitive game. People routinely try to get the most kills possible, people always try to get their appropriate screentime and they feel very jipped when their characters fail and other characters succeed at pivot moments.

So, why don't we have a well-known balanced RPG out there? My suggestion is simply that the industry hasn't required it for some time. D&D went from OD&D to 2E without really acknowledging its flaws. I would actually say that starting with 3E and the internet age, would the need for balance become so apparent. Think for a moment the large amount of homebrew fixes attempted during and after 3E and still discussed today.

So I propose that if any tabletop RPG game company actually did their homework and put a significant level of effort to make their game balanced, they'd blow the competition away. Thoughts?

[Koumei]

You'll note however that video games typically have to go through a lot of fixes and changes to reach some ideal balance point - originally, Street Fighter 2 has two characters, Ryu and Ken. Also there were other people you could lose as, but competetive gamers played as those two. To be fair, some others were fine as well.

It has actually only been in the last few years with the remakes that they're happy with the balance of the various SFII cast - and that specifically involved getting pro gamers to discuss the shortcomings, play the hell out of it, suggest changes, playtest the changes...

Likewise, Starcraft 2 can have balance fixes at any time just downloaded from Blizzard's server. I imagine it has had these - after building from the repeatedly rebalanced and fixed Starcraft, which itself brought lessons learned from Warcraft 1 & 2. Sure, it was more balanced than D&D at release, but it typically takes a lot of time and testing to reach a point where professional players are happy.

Also, that whole cycle starts again any time you add an expansion or something - which is basically what happens to D&D when you release a splat book. Now, 4E tried the "incremental fixes" thing, which doesn't actually work with games that aren't video games.

The trick here is that for roleplaying games, you would have to get it right the first time. Without even bringing in the bit where roleplaying games allow for more creativity from players (I have yet to see a RTS that lets you zoom a land rover off a cliff to ram an aircraft, as an example), which makes it much harder, you're already looking at a task that might actually be impossible.

[shadzar]

Although D&D is primarily a cooperative game, it is also a competitive game.

No, no it is not. this behavior stems from people that dont understand the conept of the game, grew up on competitive games, or are most often bullies trying to find an outlet for putting others down.

this is NOT what D&D is about. Robilar wasnt out to still screen time from Tenser or Melf.

a change in the methods mentioned to play, especially losing the roles of caller, mapper, treasurer, from the game in exchange for "design transparency", has made people THINK, wrongly, that that is what the game is. also the internet being a vast resource for telling stories and racing to be the first to point something out for someone seeking attention has created this attitude.

as i have said many times, 3rd edition begat players that do not understand the game and pandered to them, which is causing a major problem. 3.x is gone, it became pathfinder, so has no future in DDN or anything else. those players only want 3.x or have moved on to pathfinder. time for D&D to cut its losses. 4th players were the most abused having 2 editions each with a span of 2 years and being thrown away after. people will not accept a majorly 4th edition focus in DDN.

as i said to Mearls before he made the article about balance to remember that a pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold. you have to weigh things properly when you seek to balance things, and some things just arent weighed the same way.

7000 grains of feathers > 5760 grains of gold

GURPs has always strove for some sort of balance, but the problem exists such that an open system can NEVER be balanced, because the designers dont have the vast amount of imaginations of the worldwide base of players to come up with the ideas that will be used, and even two groups reading the same system may not feel that it is balanced as per "raw".

the only way to achieve such balance would be in a players own group and that group consisting of the same period throughout a lifetime such that they all agree on what is balanced.

"you can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time."

even during the few games of 3.x and 4th i suffered through, i hardly ever saw ANYONE playing MVP to get the most kills. hell nobody even played the old way of keeping track of what they killed in an adventurer's log!

[Foxwarrior]

Well, you can't fully balance an RPG that has character creation in any quantity: every character is better against some types of obstacles and opponents than others, and the DM has some choice over the nature of those obstacles. In a way this is a good thing; it's not as easy to patch the game as with a computer game, but while Starcraft II can desperately need patching when Roaches are a little too good, an RPG is necessarily much more tolerant of these things.

Then, of course, because RPGs are more tolerant, designers are more casual with balance to compensate.

[Libertad]

One argument I've heard in the past is that D&D is a cooperative game and thus interparty balance is not the most important.

I made a Fallacy out of this line of thinking.

[codeGlaze]

Well, you can't fully balance an RPG that has character creation in any quantity: every character is better against some types of obstacles and opponents than others, and the DM has some choice over the nature of those obstacles. [...]

Balance doesn't meant every unit can defeat every other unit in turn, on an equal footing.

Using SCII... a single zergling is, typically, not going to destroy a single space marine. And those are beginning units.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're looking at the idea of game balance the wrong way.

[OgreBattle]

Instead of game balance

D&D needs...

FUN Balance

[Chamomile]

Balance doesn't meant every unit can defeat every other unit in turn, on an equal footing.

Using SCII... a single zergling is, typically, not going to destroy a single space marine. And those are beginning units.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're looking at the idea of game balance the wrong way.

The SCII equivalent to a D&D character class is not a single unit, but an entire faction. In a fight between Zerg and Terrans, you can't point to one and say "this one wins, hands down."

[Stubbazubba]

So I propose that if any tabletop RPG game company actually did their homework and put a significant level of effort to make their game balanced, they'd blow the competition away. Thoughts?

Well, this is just not true. A lot of things work together to sell a product, and balance is only one piece of the puzzle.

[Korwin]

Instead of game balance

D&D needs...

FUN Balance

Agreed.

[ModelCitizen]

So I propose that if any tabletop RPG game company actually did their homework and put a significant level of effort to make their game balanced, they'd blow the competition away. Thoughts?

Can't they just lie and say the game is balanced? That's less work, and RPG fanboys won't know the difference.

[Korwin]

So I propose that if any tabletop RPG game company actually did their homework and put a significant level of effort to make their game balanced, they'd blow the competition away. Thoughts?

Can't they just lie and say the game is balanced? That's less work, and RPG fanboys won't know the difference.

I assume you would want to get non fanboys too.

[K]

Balance doesn't meant every unit can defeat every other unit in turn, on an equal footing.

Using SCII... a single zergling is, typically, not going to destroy a single space marine. And those are beginning units.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're looking at the idea of game balance the wrong way.

The SCII equivalent to a D&D character class is not a single unit, but an entire faction. In a fight between Zerg and Terrans, you can't point to one and say "this one wins, hands down."

Basically.

The lesson that 4e never learned is that you can have two different options be tactically different and more powerful in certain situations, but the key to remember is that the two options need to be as powerful as each other in the same percentage of situations.

As an example, demon-summoning and diplomancing can be equal tactics as long as they get you equal-power favors from other beings and can be used in 1/4th of the adventure. It would also help if they are mutually exclusive if they have any overlap in situations where they can be used so that people can't double-dip their power.

The key is to avoid abilities that may never come up in a campaign even though they'd seem common (Fire Resistance) while avoiding things that are crazy powerful in uncommon situations (planar binding from a scoll).

[hogarth]

So I propose that if any tabletop RPG game company actually did their homework and put a significant level of effort to make their game balanced, they'd blow the competition away. Thoughts?

Considering how long people have been playing tic-tac-toe, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

[Username17]

You'll note however that video games typically have to go through a lot of fixes and changes to reach some ideal balance point - originally, Street Fighter 2 has two characters, Ryu and Ken. Also there were other people you could lose as, but competetive gamers played as those two. To be fair, some others were fine as well.

It has actually only been in the last few years with the remakes that they're happy with the balance of the various SFII cast - and that specifically involved getting pro gamers to discuss the shortcomings, play the hell out of it, suggest changes, playtest the changes...

Likewise, Starcraft 2 can have balance fixes at any time just downloaded from Blizzard's server. I imagine it has had these - after building from the repeatedly rebalanced and fixed Starcraft, which itself brought lessons learned from Warcraft 1 & 2. Sure, it was more balanced than D&D at release, but it typically takes a lot of time and testing to reach a point where professional players are happy.

Also, that whole cycle starts again any time you add an expansion or something - which is basically what happens to D&D when you release a splat book. Now, 4E tried the "incremental fixes" thing, which doesn't actually work with games that aren't video games.

The trick here is that for roleplaying games, you would have to get it right the first time. Without even bringing in the bit where roleplaying games allow for more creativity from players (I have yet to see a RTS that lets you zoom a land rover off a cliff to ram an aircraft, as an example), which makes it much harder, you're already looking at a task that might actually be impossible.

Pretty much exactly this. Computer games become balanced in a competitive environment only by having numerous highly skilled players give back lots of feedback, bringing out numerous revisions, and executing a huge stack of nerfs, buffs, and lateral tweaks to get balance right. Even so, there are characters considered "weak" or "overpowered" in every version of Street Fighter. Starcraft 2 is impressively balanced, but it only has 3 playable factions - the equivalent of a Street Fighter or D&D clone with only 3 available character classes.

As 4e showed, that system of game balance, in addition to being amazingly difficult in a game with as many possible characters as an RPG, is actually impossible in an RPG for Table Top. Full stop. You can issue patches, but if the patches nerf things people are using or are too esoteric to understand, people just won't use the patches. And that's even if they know about the patches, which most of them won't. Version creep makes the game simply fail the first test of even being a game, because it becomes impossible to get everyone to be actually using the same version - even when they are consciously trying to do so.

But even before we get to the fact that we literally can't do Star Craft style post release patches, we also have to face up to the fact that table top RPGs don't have access to the same kinds of fan feedback mechanisms that Star Craft and Street Fighter do. There are tournament reports and organized play events, but those are stupid and don't do a very good job of replicating actual play. They don't even give you good feedback on encounter difficulty or other microcosm testing, because the players aren't familiar with tournament pregens and modules don't let you do the kinds of out-of-the-box actions that you'd actually use in a real game if you were confronted by "very challenging" circumstances (like: leaving and doing fetch quests until you were high enough level to fight the Lich King without losing half the party).

About the only real opportunity for something like that was actually the Pathfinder open playtest call. But of course, when they looked at the mountain of data the players were willing to hand them, they freaked the fuck out and refused to even consider it.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

Yes, codeGlaze did misunderstand me in the way others pointed out; nerfing the Roach is more equivalent to nerfing color spray than to nerfing some class.

But Frank, even with the ability to parse and fully comprehend the mountains of data your secret cameras in every player group provide, you still can't make an RPG that's as balanced as Starcraft 2 was before patches. In Starcraft 2 Blizzard only needs to balance the sides for maps that Blizzard designs; if they had to balance the sides for any map a player could develop, they would find the task impossible*. Especially if, like in an RPG, the game is rated partially on the breadth of strange things the DM (level designer) can nicely introduce.

*They'd probably fail a lot less than WotC or Paizo, though.

[Avoraciopoctules]

When you consider the variety of ways the Starcraft 2 editor has been used to create something beyond the scope of the original game, I'd say it's been put through a pretty intense variety of player-developed permutations.

People have used SC2 to make.
- Side-scrolling platformers
- 1st person shooters
- Cart racers
- possibly others

Many of these end up reasonably well balanced, and I think the careful design of the base game has something to do with that.

[Username17]

Yes, Star Craft has a ridiculously small play space compared to a TTRPG and it has a laughably small number of player options. 3 classes with 15 units each is less than half of what 4th edition delivered on launch. And that was roundly and rightly derided as being a thin gruel by TTRPG standards. Street Fighter has a more respectable number of character classes, but it has a playspace so minuscule that it doesn't rate comparison against any RPG worthy of the name. One on one battles, no items, final destination. Literally.

Obviously you can't test an RPG exhaustively, because that would take more time than exists. And you can't really rely on "weight of experience" arguments because of Vin Diesel effects. The only real hope is to produce playtesting systems that will find problems in a systematic fashion. Crowd sourcing can be a benefit, but only if you unleash its power by being supportive of critiques. If you allow the horde to shout down people who find problems with Oberoni fallacies, your crowd sourcing signal to noise ratio will fall to nothing.

-Username17

[Libertad]

I think that we're forgetting one more pertinent piece of information:

The video game industry is huge. Tabletop Gaming is a cottage industry in comparison. Sad to say, but money gets you resources and talent. Not always, but it does help. And the vast majority of Tabletop RPG companies aren't exactly rolling in cash.

Let's not forget that with video games, there's less room for error. The equivalent of house rules are patches and mods, which are harder to implement than the GM saying "alright, in my games, we're doing this." So the whole "if you don't like the game, change it!" slogan doesn't work as much for video games when the majority of players aren't experts in writing code. So video game designers have more incentive to look for imbalances and glitches.

[hogarth]

Let's not forget that with video games, there's less room for error. The equivalent of house rules are patches and mods, which are harder to implement than the GM saying "alright, in my games, we're doing this." So the whole "if you don't like the game, change it!" slogan doesn't work as much for video games when the majority of players aren't experts in writing code. So video game designers have more incentive to look for imbalances and glitches.

Lots of video game RPGs are wildly unbalanced. And, as alluded to in Bill's initial post, it's less of a problem because video game RPGs aren't particularly competitive between different players. (Although it's still annoying as hell that I have to drag along a relatively useless Rogue in Dragon Age, for instance.)

[Foxwarrior]

People have used SC2 to make.
- Side-scrolling platformers
- 1st person shooters
- Cart racers
- possibly others

Many of these end up reasonably well balanced, and I think the careful design of the base game has something to do with that.

I think that explanation makes no sense: it requires much less effort to make an SC2 level that is simply a normal melee but Zerg get infinite money, but even though such a level diverges less strongly from the base game, it is not balanced at all.

A better explanation is probably that it actually takes a fair bit of effort to make one of those very different levels, so people who do only need to spend a small fraction of their time on balancing it in order to make it reasonably balanced. Also, the bad levels are harder to find because of Blizzard's sorting mechanism, and even if the levels you refer to were quite unbalanced in non-obvious ways, a lack of information means that you might never find out about how the levels are unbalanced.

(Although it's still annoying as hell that I have to drag along a relatively useless Rogue in Dragon Age, for instance.)

In a game where you have some stupid follower who you're supposed to protect (hostage rescue, whatever), you don't say it's unbalanced that the follower is useless, do you?

[...You Lost Me]

In Dragon Age, it's worse than that. The rogue is the only guy that actually checks for traps and stuff, so if you want to not get traps, you have him in point and run around with the volume on high until you hear him say "watch out there's a trap there", and then you avoid it. He's also the guy that picks locks (you need loot), but I've never had a rogue that isn't crap in a fight.

To be honest, I plow right through/past anything that involved being a rogue whenever I play DA.

[Libertad]

Don't forget, Linear Warriors-Quadratic Wizards exists in Dragon Age as well. This is only rumor, but I heard that this was intentional by the designers.

[Orion]

Rogues aren't bad in Dragon Age. Leliana and Zevran are bad. Leliana suffered from the fact that archery was broken until it got patched, and Zevran from coming in at a high level missing several of his build's core talents. Both of them are dragged down by the large number of Rogue talents that are worthless, by the fact that NPCs can't afford the lockpicking feet tax, and by the fact that Rogues want to be microed for backstabbing and so on. The Rogue class is actually really, really good. If you're not going evil in DA:O, you should really be playing a Rogue. With twin daggers you will dish out more damage than any warrior build, on top of being able to pick locks and disarm traps, pick pockets for rare loot (if you read a guide to know what's worth stealing) and do extra Rogue-only sidequests. Plus you'l have something to do during fights besides stand in place swinging slooooowly.

[Kaelik]

Rogues aren't bad in Dragon Age. Leliana and Zevran are bad. Leliana suffered from the fact that archery was broken until it got patched, and Zevran from coming in at a high level missing several of his build's core talents. Both of them are dragged down by the large number of Rogue talents that are worthless, by the fact that NPCs can't afford the lockpicking feet tax, and by the fact that Rogues want to be microed for backstabbing and so on. The Rogue class is actually really, really good. If you're not going evil in DA:O, you should really be playing a Rogue. With twin daggers you will dish out more damage than any warrior build, on top of being able to pick locks and disarm traps, pick pockets for rare loot (if you read a guide to know what's worth stealing) and do extra Rogue-only sidequests. Plus you'l have something to do during fights besides stand in place swinging slooooowly.

You can play DA:O as a non mage?

Huh... Not sure why you'd want to.