Gaming's Alembic

[Manxome]

A blog about game design.

Focuses more on video games than paper-and-pencil, but there's some overlap. Seemed like the kind of thing people here might be interested in.

[Interested2]

In a similar vein: Three Month Mod

[Manxome]

Erm...not to complain, but in precisely what sense is that "in a similar vein?" Just that it is in some way related to gaming?

[Username17]

I feel him on the Burning Away Impurities discussion. That's important. I don't really follow him on the concept of balance. Basically he just said that Fighters and Wizards were balanced in D&D because Wizards were better and people knew and understood that. I disagree.

If I were to make such a sweeping generalization I'd probably say that minimal Balance is achieved when every strategy presented as viable is viable. And that ideal Balance is achieved when all such strategies are also comparable in viability.

-Username17

[Manxome]

Knowing that wizards are better than fighters isn't sufficient to make them balanced, by that definition; it would need to be the case that wizards are supposed to be better than fighters, which was probably true back in the dawn of D&D (when you got lots of fighting men and only a few were cool enough to be wizards), but doesn't appear to be true now.

It's also presumably intended in D&D that various players have similar power to affect the game, and if that's not the case, that would indicate a balance problem even if the power differences between classes are intended.


Testing whether strategies presented as viable are viable runs into difficulties if the game presents pieces of strategies, rather than wholesale strategies--which I think is usually the norm. If the power attack feat is presented as viable, that doesn't mean that every build involving power attack is supposed to be viable, or that power attack is supposed to be a viable option in all possible situations. It does mean that some build involving power attack is viable, but that's not a sufficient condition for balance.

Your definition also suggests that option A can be strictly less effective than option B and still be "balanced" as long as A is still "viable." I suspect you'd need a rather complicated definition of "viable" in order to escape that problem.

[cthulhu]

RPGs to my mind have a completely different gameplay dynamic than most computer games. In a RTS for example, it doesn't matter if some strategies are completely unworkable, because you find that out and then you try a different strategy 5 minutes later.

RPGs, and this goes for CRPGs like WoW to an extent, its really not good enough to find out 5 sessions into the game that your character sucks and your doing it all wrong, because its really hard to go back and change this, you just spend 20 hours doing the wrong thing. As opposed to Starcraft, where you just say 'next time I'll build an observer' and go on with life. Hell, that lots of strategies don;t work is half the point of starcraft, but should never be the point of D&D.

Our friend here seems to be talking about starcraft as opposed to D&D.

This guy

www.sirlin.net/

Who also writes good material about game design focuses right in on low per 'match' investment competitive games, but what he says about game balance doesn't really apply to WoW.

[Cielingcat]

WoW's rock paper scissors strategy is particularly bad because you can literally spend thousands of hours on a character, and you still lose automatically to a number of classes before the fight even starts.

[Manxome]

I would submit that being unable to figure out what's a good strategy and what's not without a huge investment of time or effort is a learning curve problem, not a balance problem.

Having something that ought to work but doesn't is a balance problem, and I think that applies equally to D&D, StarCraft, or WoW.

I haven't looked at Sirlin's stuff recently, but my recollection was that he talks a lot more about how to play games than about criticizing or designing them, and that I tend to disagree with about half of what he says.

[cthulhu]

In D&D and WoW you are not even materially playing the same game at level 16 as you are at 1. Sure you are rolling dice and everything but none of the strategies you are using at level 1 are even relevant at level 16. So even if it had the best learning curve in the world, nothing you can show people during level 1 is going to help them when they get to level 16, because they are now playing a new game with new rules and new strategies, and they couldn't possibly learn whats good in level 16 mode when they set out earlier because you don't unlock that until you completed level 15.

But due to the mechanics of RPGs you only get to experience level 16 (or 70) after dozens of hours of investment from level 1, and you are stuck with all the level 1 choices you made, so whatever choice they made at level 1 when they could have never experienced level 16's rules framework better not come back to haunt you.

In starcraft you play the same game each time, it you invest a dozen or so minutes to get to the end of that game, and if your choice in minute one was bad, okay, thats fine, but you find that out and get to start again at low cost (11 minutes). So bad choices don't punish you. You lose 12 minutes, not 12 days.

Sirlin has lots of stuff on head to head gaming, and then a chunk on game design. To be honest, I think even the stuff on playing head to head games reveals to you the different problems that RPG designers and the designers of street fighter have.

[Manxome]

I certainly agree that the practical problems involved in designing WoW and Street Fighter are wildly different.

I still think that the fact that it takes you 12 days to realize that you're laboring under a fatally bad decision you made on day 1 indicates an egregious learning curve problem. You seem to want to make the problem disappear by analyzing level 1 and level X as being "separate games," but if they were separate games, you wouldn't still be enduring the effects of the choices you made in the first "game."

If you want to say that the problem arises because designers try to treat different levels as being separate games in some respects and the same game in other respects and this creates conflicting design goals, I'll agree with that. If you want to say that doing a good job of training the player and forgiving errors is more important in a game that lasts 2 years than one that lasts 2 hours, I'll agree with that, too.

But I still think this is a learning curve problem.

[cthulhu]

Do you really think D&D levels 1 and 16 have as much in common as any two games of starcraft? Or even street fighter.

it's not even so much that your decision might have been fatally bad at level 1. I mean, playing a barbarian at level 1 is fine in D&D right? It's not exactly like you are being bludgeoned with the same suck stick. You might even be better than the rest of the team.

Though I suppose you are condemning that with your

If you want to say that the problem arises because designers try to treat different levels as being separate games in some respects and the same game in other respects and this creates conflicting design goals, I'll agree with that.

But really laying on levels and opening up new character options is a fundamental of RPGs, but its not of street fighter.

[Manxome]

You're saying "this type of game traditionally has this problem" and I'm saying "that doesn't mean it's not a problem."

Long and complicated games are naturally harder to learn than short and simple ones. That means that learning curve problems are more severe; it doesn't mean that player ignorance is somehow no longer a learning curve problem.

[Fwib]

game balance (n.) - The degree to which the rules of a game cause players who are attempting to win the game to play in the manner intended by the game’s designer; the degree to which effective gameplay agrees with intended gameplay.

Re: Applying this definition to D&D 3.x:
There seem to be many ways to 'win the game' that do not coincide with what the designers could possibly have intended, so it fails on the first part. Exactly what the designers did intend, seems to vary from one to the next - from 'Druids(and other casters) should rule' to 'Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard is the way to play' and any given game could fail on that too.

On the other hand, 'win' - if it means 'all get together an have fun' then I think that the fun is in the people, not the system (although the system can make fun harder to find).

Since many people's opinion is that D&D is not balanced, the definition seems to work, both on the basis that people are 'playing wrong'* and on the basis that 'playing right doesn't work because it isn't always fun'

* By 'playing wrong' I mean this in the spirit of the definition: that people are doing things the designers failed to anticipate - I think even such a flexible definition as this fails to be broad enough to encompass D&D.

[Orion]

Well, I think balance in videogames and tabletop games really are very diferent concepts.

To take an extreme example, in a 1-player videogame RPG, there's no particular reason you would want all classes to be equally good. The player is'nt being compared to anyone else, so some characters may have a harder or easier time getting through the game.

You probably want to make clear what the really weak characters are so newbies can avoid them, but actualy having a really weak class is a fun challenge for re-playing, and having an overpowered class expands the rang eof player skil levels that can complete the game.

Similarly, in a fighting game, I'm fine with having some characters better than others; it creates a natural handicap system that unequal players can use to compete more evenly.

It's only in RPGs where you're stuck with your character and other people's success depends on your character that exact power parity is desireable.

[RandomCasualty]

1199666961[/unixtime]]RPGs to my mind have a completely different gameplay dynamic than most computer games. In a RTS for example, it doesn't matter if some strategies are completely unworkable, because you find that out and then you try a different strategy 5 minutes later.

The other main difference between RPG and RTS is that RTS is severely time intensive. In most RPGs, you have virtually unlimited game time to do stuff. So recharge times are much more meaningful in an RTS than they are in any RPG. They may annoy you in an RPG, like Everquest and its ridiculous rest times, but it's never good to tie recharge into game time that passes, because it just might not mean anything. In RTS, seconds, minutes, hours are all things you care about, because while you're sitting on your ass charging up your templar's psistorm, your enemy could very well be storming your base. You can't just choose to run and hide in a hole while you upgrade or whatever. At the very least you're going to come out of your shell and find that the enemy has taken over most of the expansions and you're not horribly out resourced.

In D&D, you can just hide in a hole, and you've got effectively infinite time. So if the PCs want to spend 10 weeks creating a set of magic boots, nobody is going to be kicking down the door to interrupt them most of the time. You can just cast rope trick and hide in there and sleep, any time you want. You're not going to come out of the rope trick to find that the orcs have mass expanded and taken over half the map while you were sleeping. And even if they did, you honestly wouldn't even care, because you don't really even have anything you must protect. If trying to defend the village of Blackwater proves to be too annoying, you can just let the village burn and move on to the next city.

D&D (and most RPGs for that matter) really should get away from the idea that time matters in some kind of balanced measurable fashion. An X/day ability sometimes may might as well just be X/encounter, and in other games it may be X/level. As a designer, you don't have a fucking clue and it makes the whole X/day crap terrible game design.