Balance vs. Fun

[Username17]

Most of the time, there is no conflict between balance and fun. It is not "fun" to be told that your character concept is weaker than another person's character concept. It is not fun to get shafted arbitrarily. It is not fun to be treated unfairly. The old school Wizards vs. Fighters disparity is not fun. The 4e "you can't play a Gnome warrior" paradigm isn't fun either. But the people who complain about things being "dumbed down" or "neutered" in the name of balance have a point. Not the point they think they have, but a legitimate one nonetheless.

The fact is that it is also "not fun" to have your choices not matter. It's not fun to never be surprised. It's not fun have things never "go your way." In short, it's fun to have highs and the only way to have those is to also have lows. In order to get the fun out of having something work out better than normal, you have to accept things working out less good than that the rest of the time.

Nowhere is this more viscerally obvious than in the realities of magic items. A magic sword that is "better" is both memorable and fun. But the only way for it to exist is for the other magic swords to be worse than that. The only way to get fun out of the Bane Blade is to have the team Knight be objectively better than and thus unbalanced with himself before he found the Bane Blade.

This is a huge problem of game design, because there is no guaranty that the game will outlast Sir Percival running around with the Bane Blade long enough for Sheila the Thief to get her awesome cloak of invisibility. And indeed, it also presents the Christmas problem, which is that there is no fun and no bragging rights for getting the Bane Blade unless there was a real and present danger of never actually getting it. That is, for the acquisition of the Bane Blade to be an actual accomplishment, you seriously have to go through with not giving one out in some campaigns.

-Username17

[Murtak]

I believe balancing should happen outside the game. For DnD that means balancing classes, spells, feats, monsters and so on to a point where all of them are valid choices. Once you start playing imbalance will occur of course. Whether that happens in the form of the barbarian's player suddenly deciding to stack on levels of wizard, because the rogue gets a magic sword before the knight does or because the sorcerer's player is a gifted RL diplomat and outshines the bard does not matter. It is impossible to have a balanced game once it's running - which is why pre-game balancing is so important.

So yes, player choices should have discernible results, both good and bad. Yes, there should be up and downs. But these should not occur while building your character or while picking spells from leveling up. (Failing that "wrong" choices should at least be obvious. Two-weapon fighting being rather worthless for a pixie mage is fine, Dodge being useless is not.)

Once the game starts all bets are off. Some will get lucky and win the lottery/pick the right path/find the one item they always wanted, some will trigger the trap/insult the noble/get their asses kicked and some poor bastard will have his soul devoured by the demon lord he failed to hide from. And that's fine - at least for me and my groups it has always been fine. Being unlucky and dying is fine, being stupid and having your favorite sword stolen is fine and even having another player outshine you three sessions in a row by being in the right place at the right time is fine.

But starting the game and never really having a chance due to writing "fighter" instead of "Warblade" on your sheet stinks.

[RobbyPants]

I believe balancing should happen outside the game. For DnD that means balancing classes, spells, feats, monsters and so on to a point where all of them are valid choices. Once you start playing imbalance will occur of course. Whether that happens in the form of the barbarian's player suddenly deciding to stack on levels of wizard, because the rogue gets a magic sword before the knight does or because the sorcerer's player is a gifted RL diplomat and outshines the bard does not matter. It is impossible to have a balanced game once it's running - which is why pre-game balancing is so important.

I agree about the pre-game balancing part.

Now, lets say after that one player wins the item lottery (or whatever) that throws off the balance. Is it a problem after that point to "exclude" that player from the next item lottery until everyone's on the same page? So, winning early still lets you be more powerful longer, but you then put checks in place to keep it from getting further out of hand.

In game balancing would mean that no items are always better than other items, so you wouldn't have to worry about when people get their Bane Swords.

[Username17]

One thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that fair is not the same as equal and that neither are the same as identical.

A base example is doing 2 damage all the time or 10 damage one time in 5. Over the long haul, you'll do the same amount of damage, but a child can see that the slow and steady character outperforms the big money big chances character when enemies have 4 or 6 hit points, while the highly random character does better when enemies have 8 or 10. The two methodologies are fair, but they are not identical, or even equal. And honestly, that's good. When two options are identical, there's no choice at all. And even when choices are equal, the choice doesn't mean much even when it exists at all.

But this extends to all walks of life in the game. Even things that the player has no control over, such as scavenged resources or allies. The game is better when you have a chance of finding the Sword of Kas. And indeed, finding the Sword of Kas is more exciting the lower the real chances of it having happened actually are. Which of course means that the average sword that a player will have is going to be substantially better than the sword that they will probably have. What to do about that?

Well, the probable solution is to balance the game against the Mode rather than the Mean. That is, the game should be balanced against the PCs running around with the "standard" magic sword, and simply accept that there is a small but real chance that the PCs will find the Sword of Kas, and use that instead. And if that happens, the game will become easy. And indeed, that's OK. Indeed, that's fun. As long as it doesn't happen too often.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

Yeah one of the real things people miss from 2E is that ability to find a really awesome magic item that changes everything.

It just doesn't happen in 3E or 4E, because the magic items are on such a regimented system of minor increases that you never really get a sense that your weapon is awesome. It's just the item you happen to be using for the next 4-5 levels.

The diablo mass minor magical item mentality never really worked well for D&D, and really it's something I'd prefer that they just drop entirely. It's really not fun. I think D&D players would generally rather have occasional large meaningful rewards rather than constant meaningless ones.

[TavishArtair]

Diablo items are more an example of what Frank is talking about here, I think, than a counterexample. You tend to find "standard" magical items, i.e. blues, and occasionally you get a rare or artifact item which you rock the house with. And you have the best odds of finding these off a tough boss, because sure, why not, but there's also a vague chance of finding one in every crate or barrel you kick open, because that helps you actually have a chance of getting an artifact before you kill Diablo. Occasionally all your rares aren't so hot, and you find a blue that is better than any rare you've found (or indeed, any rare you could find), and in fact those are some of the most powerful magical items, but really their effective rarity is about the same.

Since you only have ten magical items, assuming we're counting ones actually equipped, at only two more than a Tome game, and infinitely less than some of the... permutations I have seen on D&D characters, or, geh, MMO characters. MMO characters are really the magic item design we want to avoid. You can, in Diablo, find a progression-breaking magic item. But in MMOs, it generally is all about progression all the way. If you have more resources, like guildmembers and so on, your progression might look different from someone who is scavenging from level 1, but both are on a fairly strict progression path. You just can't find an item that you would take all the way to Hell (or well, Outland) somewhere in your early levels, whereas finding an item you will equip for the remainder of the game is possible in Diablo 2's Act I.

I checked, and yes, a WoW character is sporting something like 17 item slots that equip something useful. This is way beyond the pale of anyone caring. Diablo 2 is freaking modest by comparison.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I like the idea of handing out lots of weird crap, which occasionally happens to work very well for one of the characters.

[Thymos]

This kind of fun is from the novelty of the sword and having a badass.

I think, judging by diablo 2, that this kind of fun only works for so long. If you play 50 games (not sessions) and you find the sword of badass in the first one, it's great. If you find it the second time it's cool, but not as great. The third time is still good. Even if you only find it five times, a 1/10 chance, by the fifth time it's not as exciting.

I think far more fun can be obtained by giving all the players abilities with the potential to be badass in the right circumstances and then letting the players create those circumstances. Basically give them something that could be a sword of badass every game, but only if they use it right. That way it's not just the joy of dumb luck (not everyone is a gambler), but also the joy of accomplishment.

The wizard in 3.x could be a good example of this if his abilities were balanced. Someone could (I guess) suck with him, yet another person with the same spell list and some more skill/imagination could rule the game.

I think you hit something with the sword of badass being awesome is fun, but I don't think it's occasionally finding the sword of badass, but rather occasionally having the sword of badass be the perfect tool.

[PhoneLobster]

Level system.

Encounter based challenge rating system.

Stupid conversation over.

[Archmage]

Wait, what?

How does a level-based encounter system that balances things on a CR/EL paradigm solve the problem of "in order for your choices to be meaningful, sometimes you have to benefit from them and sometimes they have to be unhelpful/detrimental?"

Balancing encounters the way 3.5e does doesn't actually take into account the fact that if you're using 2e-style treasure tables somebody might roll the Sword of Kas with one character and never get anything better than a masterwork longsword with a different one. They're going to be able to handle radically different challenges.

You could argue that this is because the power of the character is being altered by something that isn't level, but that doesn't matter. You could say the exact same thing about feat choices that provide situationally useful benefits or even playing a character class that doesn't perform well in certain situations because they're specialized for something else. And even if you argue that designing a class that's good at X but can't do Y very well is bad design in some cases, that doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly common and to some extent is necessary or you wind up with characters where everyone can do everything and none of your choices actually matter.

[Username17]

Archmage, you need a PhoneLobster translator, because what you just witnessed was a drive by thread crapping, and if you engage with it, you're going to get a ranting screed by PhoneLobster that will derail the entire thread. I'll save you the trouble.

PhoneLobster believes that any abstract balance paradigms are doomed and pointless, and that the only thing that can ever move us forward is to have an all-encompassing prediction engine of how likely characters are to succeed at specific tasks. He further believes that attempting to balance players against each other by having them perform well in some circumstances and poorly in others and thus being somehow balanced in the "long run" is futile and unfair on first principles.

We could have a long discussion about how if you don't believe in arbitrary average scenarios to judge the utility of abilities you cannot "price" abilities and thus can't create characters who will be eventually confronted by obstacles (whether average or not). Or we could go into an equally long discussion about how any prediction engine complex enough to give valid answers is actually more work to crank through than actually running the game through the challenges in the first place, and is thus of no help whatsoever for people actually playing the game (although it can be of considerable interest to people designing the game). But really, none of these are conversations worth having, because PhoneLobster stopped actually listening to external inputs on this subject years ago. That's not an exaggeration.

Suffice it to say: I don't agree with PhoneLobster's assessment. I will never agree with PhoneLobster's assessment. His contentions are mathematically, provably wrong, and there is absolutely nothing that I, or anyone else can say or do to change his mind. And he knows that I, and virtually everyone else on this board feels that way on this issue, and he is coming to throw down that comment for no reason other than to attempt to derail a discussion through trolling.

That is all.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Yeah one of the real things people miss from 2E is that ability to find a really awesome magic item that changes everything.

It isn't just that in regards to the power of an item, but the fact that there are so many in newer version of the game. You get them for everything so the novelty wears of and you just use magic like a resource like some crazy bag of CLWs. You take the importance of earning the thing as well as its specialness for being something that not everyone else has when you end up with tons of them, the common townsfolk should run in fear of you at first glance. The nobles would see you wearing more jewelry that them and question it and a whole slew of other problems arises when you have the chacne to find a migc item under every bush or in a magic shoppe.

The fun is lost in this case when the world isn't balanced. I magic is supposed to exist in some limited fashion where not everyone wields it in everyday items, then a group of people having tons of them, and common folk having none really throws of the balance and feel of the world.

It makes them look a lot more common place and you would wonder why everyone doesn't have them. Then if everyone has them, they lose all their specialness and your own advantage for having them.

It is a problem in earlier editions that many players had with high-magic games because they never really fit with their own concept. Once magic is commonplace, then all the novelty wears off, and their usefulness does as well. You are basically playing keep up with the Jones', and the Jones' happens to be everyone else in the world. Which in turn makes the PCs less valuable of a commodity to have around because they are no longer special themselves.

When there is fewer magic items, the players can have a tougher time doing things in their daily lives, but on a whole the rewards they get for those things become worth more, as do the experiences in earning those rewards.

[Archmage]

Well, that's all good, then.

On topic, that said, I think the whole highs and lows thing should as much as possible be a result of the RNG, not major choices the players have made, though it's perfectly reasonable for players to have different talents and throw obstacles in their paths that spotlight various specializations.

But the idea of needing to have there be both magic items you want and magic items you don't want in equal or near-equal quantity doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, the taste of victory is only sweet when you know failure was a possibility, but there's a limit to how awful the flavor of defeat can be.

So what's really important is avoiding the problem 4e's magic items have where you either find a staff of ruin and orgasm at the table or you find basically anything else and count the game sessions until you can hock it and buy the item you really wanted. Even if there need to be "less awesome" prizes to make winning feel better, there need to be enough good options that there's more than one way to feel like a winner.

[Thymos]

What about instead of flexibility in finding the good item, flexibility in how good items are (as in a single item can have variance over a game in how good it is based on the situation)?

[PhoneLobster]

Aaaaand so Frank tells us all about some bunch of shit he made up.

And THAT is why you WON'T be getting a "screed", because discussion on this forum is such worthless shit as that these days.

Your discussion sir is shit, you are shit your ideas are shit and this thread is just you wanking off to your fan boys AGAIN.

[mean_liar]

PhoneLobster, a three-line post oozing derision deserves to get shit on.

Elaborate in your incomprehensible/misinterpreting manner if you want, but just leaving two short lines of opinion and a "fuck you" is just drivel.

It is fan-wank though. I'll give you that.

[Orca]

The discussion here could be better sometimes, but Frank comes up with some good shit.

My 2c; no magic item should make you win at everything. Take the One Ring in LotR; it's great, it makes you invisible, but it doesn't work on everyone e.g. Nazguls. There's more drawbacks, but that's the relevant one in a D&D situation, there are creatures which can see thru invisibility.

[God_of_Awesome]

What PL seems to be saying it if you add a sword that makes a character more powerful, give correspondingly more powerful encounters. Calculate the sword into their ECL, as it seems.

The problem becomes everyone else has to deal with these more powerful encounter. The possible solution is to calculate an average ECL (Doable, I suspect) of the whole party and give encounter accordinly. The problem becomes then the person with Infinite+1 Sword still outshines everyone. So the more practical solution is to give everyone kick-ass items at the same times. A smart DM would do that.

[Username17]

But the idea of needing to have there be both magic items you want and magic items you don't want in equal or near-equal quantity doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, the taste of victory is only sweet when you know failure was a possibility, but there's a limit to how awful the flavor of defeat can be.

Not in near equal quantities: vastly higher quantities. If you hand out only 5 items a level and all of them are things you think the PCs are going to use (like 4e's treasure parcel system), then none of the items you hand out feel rare. One hundred percent of the items the PCs can use are upgrades, so each one simply feels like something you're entitled to, and none of them feels rare or special. There's the age old question of why the fuck you ca't snag the obviously magic weapons and armor of the enemies you kill, but once you accept the MMO "drops" system in the first place you're going to be comparing the items that drop only to other items
that drop. And that means that none of the items are "good" because theoretically they are all good.

In order to make a sword be one in a hundred, you seriously have to hand out ninety nine other swords. Bonus points if you can get the players to leave most of those swords lying on the field of battle where they fall.

So what's really important is avoiding the problem 4e's magic items have where you either find a staff of ruin and orgasm at the table or you find basically anything else and count the game sessions until you can hock it and buy the item you really wanted. Even if there need to be "less awesome" prizes to make winning feel better, there need to be enough good options that there's more than one way to feel like a winner.

The 4e system has numerous problems, and the things where the "trade in" factor is really shitty and most of the items that the game says that you want are actually not something you care about and you're expected to get very small bonuses on your weapons continuously are all severe problems that are somewhat separate from the one I'm talking about.

The core complaint I am placing is that if it is assumed that you will replace your +2 sword with a +3 sword, then finding that +3 sword does not feel good. Indeed, not finding that sword you are "entitled" to feels bad. Actually getting the upgrade feels normal because it is normal. If you want the bigger sword to feel good, actually getting one can't be something you are entitled to.

There's a whole separate problem, where a +1 relative bonus is in most cases too small to notice. There's a reason why Iron Armbands of Wang and similar items are available only in +2, +4, and +6.And that's because in a d20 world, +2 just feels a lot more noticeable than +1. So if you were going to keep enhancement bonuses on weapons at all (which I am not sure you should), then getting rid of the +1, +3, and +5 options (or the +2, +4, and +6 options) is something of a no-brainer. But beyond that, the levels at which you can possibly find a bigger sword should be much larger than the levels that you are actually expected to have the larger sword. The biggest sword should be very rare, but nonetheless potentially findable at first level. Because that would be "awesome" and make a good story.

-Username17

[K]

The core of the problem is that to have a playable game you need to have a system where things are objectively balanced, but subjectively unbalanced.

I mean, things fall apart once the encounter that is challenging for the guy with a Sword of Ruin is insta-kill for the guy that didn't get a Sword of Ruin. That's why objective balance between characters is important.... you need to not have to radically rewrite your adventure and re-stat stuff because the Sword of Ruin guy can't show up one session.

But things need to feel unbalanced for people to get excited by loots. I can say with only a little shame that I used to buy Dungeon Magazine and the first thing I did was skim the adventures for "DM special" loot. Sometimes that would be a book that grant a permanent feat after you read it, or something as obscure as a mask that granted weretiger lycanthropy (the best kind, of course).

The same goes for abilities. Stuff needs to feel more powerful than other options, but to not actually be in truth.

I suggest horizontal power increases and flavor power increases, like this:

Horizontal power increases are the Sword of Icy Hot in a world where swords come in Flame and Frost bonus damage, but the Sword of Icy Hot lets you choose Flame OR Frost on a round by round basis. This feels more powerful, but is no more different from a fighting guy carrying a Sword of Flame in one scabbard and a Sword of Frost in another.

Flavor power increases are also key. I mean, in a world of Swords of Frost that do Frost damage, a Sword of Babor that is a Frost sword with the ability to let you not wear winter clothes and gives you a claim to the throne of Babor feels way more powerful than something you pulled off a dead barbarian.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The guy wielding the new frost longspear will feel really special when the party goes up against the red dragon, but hopefully the one with dust of sneezing and coughing won't feel left out. Amen to horizontal power.

But I don't think that bengay swords are the right way to go about it...

[Username17]

The core of the problem is that to have a playable game you need to have a system where things are objectively balanced, but subjectively unbalanced.

I'm in favor of that sort of thing to a point. The fact remains that given enough playing time, players will see behind the curtain. Not all of them will of course, there are people who still play Skill Challenges right out of the book and don't notice that they don't work because they just aren't introspective enough to notice that contribution reduces success.

Sooner or later you're basically going to have to nut up and star giving real asymmetric power boosts or accept that people will get bored with your games. I mean let's be honest, I have to this day not played as many 3e characters as I have played 2nd edition AD&D characters. Now in part that's because the constant death and rerolling of the AD&D world forced me to start a lot more characters, but also because the sheer randomnicity of the life cycle of an AD&D character kept players coming back for more in a really tangible manner.

I mean, things fall apart once the encounter that is challenging for the guy with a Sword of Ruin is insta-kill for the guy that didn't get a Sword of Ruin. That's why objective balance between characters is important.... you need to not have to radically rewrite your adventure and re-stat stuff because the Sword of Ruin guy can't show up one session.

I agree that if not getting the Sword of Ruin causes your team to die then you're basically looking at a nonfunctional game. Sooner or later the guy with the Sword of Ruin is going to not show up, or you're going to lose the sword, or whatever and then it's TPK city. But I also think that not being able to see real tangible benefit from getting a Sword of Ruin is NotFun. You can string people along with cool story depictions and neat horizontal options for a while, but eventually the players are going to decide on a "look" they want and then just keep the glacier armor and the thunder glaive and then all treasure stops being interesting.

And that's a pretty viable play style. If you're doing things superheroically or historically, then the players are going to settle on their favorite sword or pistol pretty quickly and then just stay that way. And in such games, players simply using their iconic equipment and leaving enemies with their fallen weaponry on the ground is the whole point. But... if you want to pretend that the players are going to gt excited by what they can loot, you have to produce a scenario where they actually will be.

And what that means is that you have to accept the idea that the game will become unbalanced in favor of the PCs. You have to balance the game as if they never get the Sword of Ruin and then set things up so that if they play to infinity they eventually will find it. And then they'll be overpowered until they retire their character.

Of course, there are things you can do for that too. You can throw some iconic overpowered enemies into the mix, such that when the PCs outgrow their econiche enough, they can go after Iuz or Demogorgon and have that be an accomplishment. An accomplishment which, very importantly, there is no guaranty that they will ever be able to do in any particular game.

-Username17

[Rejakor]

And then Goku has to fight the superfiends from beyond space.

And you know what? I'm okay with that. I'm okay with campaigns having a lifecycle, one that you can stretch or compress as much as you like. That's good.

[Mask_De_H]

This thread is gold for 5E. I had hit a wall with weapon design and this helps out a lot.

So, if you have mundane stuff scale to your level; it removes the need to dumpster dive for little bonuses. If you don't have to dumpster dive for little bonuses, you don't have to give out magic items like free samples. If you don't have to give out magic items like free samples, you can give people real ultimate power as Christmas presents if you want, confident that the system can support each character doing well enough with the clothes on their back.

Actually, taking this to a logical extreme, you can just have players come up with magical items that their characters get as level advancements (a la Chakras), using tiering systems akin to the Book of Gears. Then, you can make the really crazy weapons unique by either disallowing players to get those abilities or add on more abilities than the normal chakra whatever would give.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Why do we need a whole bunch of magic items at all? We can give players the numeric boosts they need as they level. We have the technology!

Even better, we can cut out a lot of the number inflation to begin with.

I'd rather have a game where your character could function on zero magic items. That makes every single item a distinct and noticeable improvement (assuming players acquire like 1-3 items total over the whole game).

Seriously, I'll give up my character's magic hat, boots, cape, gloves, armbands, rings, amulet, etc etc etc in an instant. Throw that trash away. Then he can be the guy who has a totally sweet flying carpet that no one's ever seen before. Or if you have a magic weapon, it's actually excalibur or mjolnir or some other legendary one, and not just "a +1 longsword".

With that paradigm, you might only see excalibur one game in a hundred, but that would be "the game where we found excalibur" and a different game might be "the game where we rocked out on your flying carpet" or "the game where we had that Instant Fortress". If you only get a few items, each one can be memorable and special enough to actually matter in a big way.

And sure, you're leaving hundreds of swords on the battlefield, because no one has a magic sword and you're still using your family heirloom weapon or whatever.