Game Balance

Another short ranting post I made on the forums that I wish to save, this one in response to a thread where someone claimed 'Game Balance Is A Myth'. Here goes:

Game balance is sort of a nebulous ideal. You're never going to achieve it with a game system, at least not perfectly, but that doesn't make it a bad thing to strive for.

If a typical group of players with a typical game master (based on your target audience for the game) would enjoy your game with minimal problems, you're probably good. It's not so much that balance makes the experience better as certain kinds of imbalance can make the typical experience worse. The plight of the poor newbie that plays a fighter in 3e D&D, expecting to contribute meaningfully to epic battles against dragons and such, is a good example of the problem imbalance can cause.

However!

I think it's more important that the game designers understand and explain the balance and relative capabilities of things, and make them explicit, than that everything be balanced against each other. There's a significant difference between 'this character type is better because that's how the setting works' (Solars in Exalted, for instance) and 'this character type is better because of miscalculations by the game designers' (Clerics in 3e D&D). When people complain about poor balance, they are almost always complaining about the latter sort of problem -- relative power assumptions by the game designers that don't bear out in play because of poor game design.

The Fates

The Fates

Via various sales (mostly on drivethrurpg.com), I've picked up a multitude of Fate versions. They're all pretty similar at the core, of course, but each offers a slightly different experience, with different advantages and problems. I've only had a dozen or so short sessions so far, with few players and minimal conflict, so I can't rate the rules terribly well, but I can at least give me impressions of them.

I'll list the games in the order I picked them up.

Strands of Fate
Strands wants to be the GURPS of the Fate world, a multipurpose multigenre toolkit for whatever type of game you might want to run. It uses Abilities plus Skill Aspects rather than Skills, making it a bit more like a traditional RPG, and its Advantages system feels a bit more like GURPS or Tri-Stat than Fate. It works decently, but I'm not sure I'd ever want to run this thing out of the box. It's got a lot of rough edges. However, it's full of great ideas and rule options, and I'd recommend it to anyone planning to run Fate - it really does a good job of showing off all the ways you can tweak the system.

The Dresden Files
This one's amazing. Anyone that's a fan of Jim Butcher's book series or is even just looking for a good urban fantasy RPG wouldn't go much wrong here. Its one glaring flaw is that the system for ritual magic is kind of a mess, with a lot of things left under-detailed or absent, and a system for casting rituals that doesn't actually balance very well.

Legends of Anglerre
Anglerre is probably the most complex Fate game I've seen, but it seems to cover all the facets of epic fantasy from the 'mud-stained peasants getting beat up by baby goblins and small farm animals' of first-level D&D all the way up to the 'epic swordsmen singlehandedly fight armies while master sorcerers call down fire and ruin on entire cities' levels that Exalted reaches. The stunt construction rules are good, the rules for mass combat and organization conflict are good, and the rules for fighting out-of-scale creatures make me really want to run a Shadow of the Colossus game.
The big downside: if you buy it online, the .pdf is absolutely TERRIBLE. I mean, it's good quality in appearance, but it comes to something like 130 megabytes, loads painfully slow, takes forever to page through, and doesn't contain links in the text like better quality RPG products do - for instance, in Dresden Files, if something says 'see page 130', you can click on it and it'll take you to page 130; with Anglerre, you have to do that manually.

Free Fate
Free Fate is simply a fanmade compilation of the basic Fate rules in very generic terms, with a simplified stunt system and a decent advancement system. As the name suggests, it doesn't cost anything. I found it through a link on someone's forum signature on RPGNet. Not much to say here about quality: it's not so much a version of Fate as it is just a description of the core rules, so there's really nothing wrong with it and it doesn't really offer anything innovative.

Diaspora
The Fate space game. I think if I run a space game I'm more likely to use GURPS 4e (mostly the GURPS Spaceships line) rather than Fate, but it's a nice system. The cluster generator is probaby the best part of this book, though it's only one chapter; it allows you to randomly generate a small cluster of interconnected solar systems without spending massive amounts of time on it. Diaspora also introduces the concept of Scope, for Aspects, which lets the storyteller throw around scene and item Aspects much more freely without worrying about the balance issues that might occur.

Spirit of the Century
This is the game that started it all. If you're getting into Fate, I recommend picking this one up! It's cheap to buy the .pdf, or you could just hunt down the system reference documents, which are free but lack detailed examples, art, etc. Spirit of the Century's missing some of the innovations of the later games, but it is probably the 'purest' iteration of the system so far. Its biggest problems are a sort of stunted character advancement system that may not appeal to some (you basically start out as skilled and powerful as you'll ever be, and advancement is a matter of changing your focus rather than increasing in power) and a too-generous stress and consequence system that can (from what I've heard, and the math seems to back this up) make combats drag on for too long.

So, there you go! That's my initial thoughts on the various versions of Fate I've encountered. If you're interested in Fate, check out Free Fate (if you can find it), read up on it online, and maybe pick up Spirit of the Century. Fate's not a perfect system, but it's worth the read, and some of the .pdfs are really cheap!

The Rules aren't a Black Box

There's a pet peeve of mine that I see come up a lot in RPG discussions - the idea that you can't houserule something until you've tried it rules-as-written. This is my reply to such a post on RPG.net.

Hm.

I think I've done pretty well, honestly, and I find it a little offensive to be painted as a sort of ignorant fool that doesn't 'really' understand the games I run.

It's really not that hard. Rules comprehension is a skill you can develop. The rules are not a black box, only revealing their effects through careful study during play. They're all laid out in the text in front of you. Some games (again, Exalted comes to mind) have everything so interlinked that it IS really a pain to work out the ramifications of even a minor change, but such is not always the case. Many games are fairly straightforward or modular in design, such that you can modify one part or another without doing any harm. Yes, there's a chance a house rule will be a mistake. But you don't need hours of playtesting and empirical evidence to realize that someone made a math error or didn't consider an important edge case when they wrote a rule. To use an extreme example, I really, really don't need to experience 'bucket healing' in play to decide that it's stupid and declare that drowning does not work that way.

In fact, sometimes empirical experience is actively a bad way to develop a houserule, especially when you're working with probabilities, as you often are in an RPG. Personal experience is notoriously susceptible to bias and superstition when dice are involved, while it's relatively easy to apply statistics and thought experiments to map out the results of a change.

A lot of game systems just have bad math, incomplete-but-interesting subsystems that could use a little more detail, and, often, contradictions that outright need house ruling because the RAW are incomprehensible.

'Bucket healing', by the way, came up earlier in the thread; it's a weird obvious loophole in the d20 drowning rules that lets you heal a dying (between -1 and -10 hp) character up to zero hit points by briefly drowning him, such as by dunking his head in a bucket of water for a short time.

Revisiting Old Thoughts, Again

Wow, I've been away for a while! My apologies to anyone that's been reading this. Anyway, status update on things:

I've basically stopped work on the handful of projects listed here. Rul-Skaath is still rolling around in my head. It needs a better name and a smoother system. For the time being, I'll leave it alone, but it's the one I'm most likely to revisit.

In the time I've been gone, I've picked up the Dresden Files RPG and Strands of Fate, both FATE games. FATE is a system I've avoided in the past, but curiosity finally got the best of me. Once I've had a chance to see the system in play, I intend to post a review of it. As yet, though, all I've been able to do is read the things.

I also picked up Unknown Armies. I don't think I like the system on that one, overall, but I really like the adept magic system and the detailed stress meters. Again, I haven't had much chance to play with it due to player scarcity during the holidays, though.