Game Balance Part 2: Character Balance

Now that we've talked a bit about balance in general, let's look at character balance specifically. Take, for example this comment by Greywulf found on his critical-hits blog:

Game balance is the responsibility of the GM, NOT the job of the game designers. Their responsibility is to create workable rules that are fast, flexible, consistent and fun to use. It’s the job of the GM to make sure that each player gets time in the limelight and a chance to shine.

By over-emphasizing Balance as a core tenet of D&D the 3rd Edition designers had to make far too many assumptions about party size, composition and makeup, and that had knock-on effects right through the game — from how to calculate XP to Challenge Ratings to how many monsters makes a “fair fight” to how combat plays to spell durations too.... well, I’m sure you get the idea.

I can’t really think of any other rule system that puts Balance on such a pedestal at the expense of everything else. That’s a Bad Design Choice by my book, and just encourages the Character Class Arms Race we’re seeing in 4th Edition - “now the Paladin is a better melee combatant, so we need to make the Fighter better too”.......

Balance be damned. Give me a set of great rules and I’ll decide what’s a fun encounter for my players, thanks very much.

Reading his comment from a game-designer perspective I can easily endorse much of what he wants. At the same time the central argument is essentially one huge contradiction. Consider the following two quotes:

Game balance is the responsibility of the GM, NOT the job of the game designers.

and

[The game designer's] responsibility is to create workable rules that are fast, flexible, consistent and fun to use.

If a game designer leaves "game balance" in the hands of the GM as argued for in the first quote, it becomes impossible to meet the requirements listed in the second quote. Things become clearer, however, when we consider what he's asking for in the light of character balance alone.

Character balance, a misguided goal?

Character Balance, the idea that two characters can be different but roughly equivalent, sounds good on paper. A naive game designer may even write “characters must be balanced!” in big bold letters as a stated goal of his system. The problem here (as many long-time gamers could tell our enterprising designer) is that, like homes made out of brick or wood, characters cannot be balanced in general, they can only be balanced in specific.

When it comes to character balance context matters: you playing your character, with those specific players and their characters, in this specific campaign run by that DM. Change any one of those factors and a character that was perfectly balanced before suddenly becomes horribly broken. Without knowing that context there's no objective way to determine if a character is balanced, which makes talking about character balance something of a red red herring.

Since character balance is difficult to discuss objectively it may be tempting to dismiss the discussion out of hand. Yet character balance expresses an important desire players have, we just need a way to more accurately articulate that desire before we can have a productive discussion about it.

So let's take a step back. When players talk about character balance, what is it they really want?

Often, I'd argue, character balance has less to do with balance and a lot more to do with fun: I'm having fun playing the type of character I want to play and I'm contributing to the fun of the group as a whole. If my character is horrible at everything but still fun, then my character is "balanced" in the only way that character balance is meaningful.

If character balance is about fun, how does having “too much” fun make things “unfun”?

This statement gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of game design and something every would-be designer needs to remember:

Game designers don't create games, they create tools that people use to play games.

That may sound like semantic gobbledygook, but the distinction is important: rules are not games, rules are tools used to play games. When you try to restrict what your gamers can do with those tools (perhaps in an effort to ensure “character balance”) the best result you can hope for is something benign. The specific reasons for this are many but all of them basically boil down to one thing: you don't know what your players are going to try to do.

If there's one thing that's true about gamers in general it's that they'll forever surprise game designers with the variety of ways they play their games. When you put artificial restrictions in your game you often end up limiting your players' creativity. If I want to do something and your rules won't let me, then your rules aren't fun.

The “something” I want to do can vary. If, for example, I want to play a low-powered character I'm going to have a hard time doing that in 4E D&D without significant retooling. The problem here isn't that 4E is less fun than earlier editions its that 4E is simply more focused. 4E assumes players want to play high-fantasy, adventure campaigns that have cinematic combat with miniatures as its core activity. If that doesn't describe the game you want to play then 4E isn't going to be fun for you.

The fact that 4E also made huge strides towards powers balance is incidental — the RAW rules (rules as written) support fewer options than 3E does. People who depend on those options for their fun are going to be having less of it in 4E.

Game Balance Part 1: What is Balance?

Conversations about Game Balance have been popping up in various gamer blogs since the release of 4E D&D. There seems to be two sides making contradictory arguments that devolve into something like this:

Grognard: “I hate game balance, it makes everyone the same!”
Geek: “What are you smoking? Without game balance, everyone’s the same!”

The grognards and the geeks seem to be arguing that the same design goal causes two different — and completely opposite — results. They can’t both be right can they? Yes they can, but that’s because they’re really arguing about two different things.

Lets try that caricature of a conversation again, a little bit differently:

Grognard: “I hate character balance, it makes everyone the same!”
Geek: “What are you smoking? Without powers balance, everyone’s the same!”

Two completely different yet subtly similar statements, and yes, both can be true.

What does it mean to say a game is “balanced”?

Before we discuss the differences between character and powers balance, it’s important to know exactly what balance means, or at least what I’m hoping to express with the term.

Balance implies a mathematical relationship that’s going to always be true, or at least true inside a limiting set of circumstances. The nature of this relationship is one of equivalency , not equality. I can build a home out of wood or brick — the two materials are equivalent in that respect. They are not, however, equal (as the little pigs can attest). Wood may be preferable over brick in some circumstances, brick over wood in others. In general though, either can be used to build some mighty fine homes.

In gaming terms, the fact that neither material is always “the best” makes wood and brick balanced. If brick were always better than wood — or at least better in almost every situation under consideration — then brick would be overpowered and unbalanced. If, on the other hand, there’s no significant difference between the materials in any situation being considered — implying that the only difference between them is aesthetic — then the two materials are mechanically equal.

In gaming both of the preceding situations are generally undesirable:

• When a rule or power is significantly overpowered, you get power-gaming. While your players can choose the less optimum option, its always going to be just that: less optimum.

• When several rules all do exactly the same thing, you have a false-choice: you're given an opportunity to choose, but there's no significant difference between the alternatives.

In the universe of the three little pigs, brick is always better than sticks and straw; giving your players a choice between the three isn’t really meaningful. Any pig who wants to survive being hunted by the big bad wolf is going to build his house out of brick. When some pigs decide to build their homes out of sticks and straw anyway, the pig who builds out of brick is going to be the hero every time. Unless handled well by the players and GM alike, this sort of spotlight hogging can have bad consequences for the group.

Similarly, there’s little difference between straw and sticks for our little pigs. While aesthetics are important, things like this are best handled without complicating your core game mechanics. If the game designer allows himself to wax poetically about the nature of straw and sticks the best he can hope for is that he complicates his game for little gain. At worse, players will assume sticks and straws are viable choices (otherwise, why go into such detail?) only to become frustrated when the big bad wolf comes along and blows their houses down, anyway.

Game Balance then is about building a game from parts that are functionally equivalent in many ways, but not identical. Each part should have different strengths and weaknesses that are relevant to the game, being better in some situations, worse in others. In roleplaying games, these various parts fall into one of several categories, including classes, equipment, spells, feats, and skills. Most of these categories, however, are derivations (or implementations) of the two we mentioned at the start of this article: characters and powers.

I’ll be discussing both characters and powers, and why the balancing requirements for each is radically different, in future articles.

Epic Cave Slime

I'm not sure I understand the full context of The Tyranny of Fun, but at first impression of the blogs/message boards linked by Chatty, the actual complaints I see fall in three major categories:

1. The jargon doesn't facilitate roleplay.
2. There's too much of a focus on combat.
3. Epic Cave Slime is stupid.

The Jargon Doesn't Facilitate Roleplay

One of the major complaints seems to be folks using game-jargon to describe their combat actions instead of describing things in-character. I have some sympathy here; the 4e rules are linked a lot closer to the mini's game than previous editions, and take quiet a bit of jargon from it.

My answer: if you don't like the verb, change it.

Take “Shifting”. If you called it “Engaging” or “Disengaging” you could follow the same essential rules without the distracting mini's jargon. A wizard, for example, may disengage (shift out of a threat range without provoking an opportunity action) and withdraw (move several squares away) from a monster. Those are real world terms that evoke real world actions. They're precise and make as much sense in character as out. Shifting, on the other hand, makes me wonder if my character needs to use the little wizard's room.

The point of all this isn't to say that D&D is fine because you can change it, but to show that, while I understand where the naysayers are coming from, we're really just arguing about semantics. Yes, designers should take into account how the rules will read at the game table. Verbs in particular, while they also need to be clear and concise, need to evoke ideas and emotions that encourage players to get into the spirit of the game.

How much should the designer sacrifice one for the other? It's a difficult call to make. I personally think D&D 4e does a pretty good job of this with most of the nouns in their game (there are a number of feats and powers in the Player's Handbook I find particularly evocative). They may have gone a bit too far towards clarity and concision at the expense of evocation with some of the minis inspired jargon, and I can see how D&D combat may be less compelling for some players under 4e because of it.

There's too much of a focus on combat.

This complaint gets to the heart of just what, specifically, the rules in a Roll Playing Game need to accomplish.

“Games-with-rules” are superfluous if all you want to do is sit in a circle playing “lets pretend”. People turn to games when they want to do something beyond what they can easily accomplish using their imagination alone. Games have rules specifically to support and facilitate those parts of the game that are too difficult, too complicated, or just too strange for most people to easily imagine. If they're good rules they'll do so in a way that:

• Is clear, concise, and consistent.
• Encourages fair play that is enjoyable for all participants.

When it comes time to create a new character, that's the kind of help I need. When it comes time to run a combat encounter, that's the kind of help I need. When it comes time to parcel out “loot”, that's the kind of help I need. When it comes time to roleplay? Mostly, I just need the rules to stay out of the way.

Epic Cave Slime is Stupid

It is, but that misses the point. Certain risks and capabilities simply should not be tied to your character's combat level — vulnerability to slippery dungeon floors is one of them. A level-gated game like D&D requires that certain capabilities improve as you level up. This makes sense when you want characters to go from facing cowardly kobolds at level 1 to fierce elder dragons at level 30. It does not make sense when you face things that should remain uniformly challenging regardless of your PC's character or class level. Cave slime is one of the those things.

So how should the game designer handle conundrums like cave slime? D&D 4e has two rules that could be leveraged for this type of challenge:

1. Saving Throws.
2. Skill Checks.

The D&D 4e designers chose to go with the second rule: the skill check. That option has the virtue of taking into account skill training and ability bonuses. Like other most other capabilities in D&D, skill checks improve as your character's level improves. For slippery floors to be meaningful to higher level characters we need cave slime that also levels up. Epic Cave Slime is born.  If only “Epic Cave Slime” sounded less like the punchline to a bad joke and more like a good game mechanic.

So why not use Saving Throws? The problem 4e runs into a here is that, unlike earlier editions, the save mechanic is pure probability: roll 1d20, if it's greater-than or equal-to a certain number, you save. That's great for things you want to terminate after a specific number of rounds (on average). It falls short for anything where you want character capabilities to influence the results. A character with high dexterity or appropriate skill training should be able to walk across slippery slime more easily than those who don't. With a saving throw, anyone who rolled poorly on an unmodified d20 would fall down — skills and attributes don't factor into it.

To handle cave slime and similar challenges, the game needs a mechanic that takes into account applicable character abilities, skills and feats, but ignores character level. Unfortunately, D&D doesn't have a core mechanic that meets those requirements. The good news here is that D&D is also a pulp-game, and part of the beauty of old fashioned pen and paper is that when you don't like a rule, its pretty easy to change.

For this case, inventing a mechanic could be done pretty simply: Ignore the +½ Character Level that you add to your Skill Checks and treat all challenges of this nature as if the characters were level 1. In fact, I'd probably house-rule that for all skill checks that don't directly involve combat (which, if I'm not mistaken, would be almost every single one of them).

Higher level characters will still have a slight advantage — they can burn feats to train more skills, and they'll have higher ability scores — but the difference is both specific and relatively small. As an added bonus, I'd always have “level-appropriate” challenges at the ready. With only 3 numbers to remember, how could I not? Again, this isn't to say that D&D 4e is fine because it can change... well maybe it is. This is one case where the designers did something stupid but it wasn't because they deviated from old-D&D. No, this time, they did something stupid because they couldn't sacrifice one of D&D's sacred cows. They opted to have level-gated content where there was no compelling reason for it and so birthed, albeit somewhat inadvertently, Epic Cave Slime.

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For other commentators see:

• The Absurdity of “The Tyranny of Fun”