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 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.

If it ain't broke...

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

A useful aphorism in many situations, but such a pain when playing around with game design.

You can pick even the most incomplete or obviously broken rule in an entire game, and if you post a suggested modification on a forum a great many people will still angrily defend it.

Granted, some house rules are just bad, but even those often fail to get a real discussion, with the actual forum threads buried under the combined cries of heresy (after all, a house-rules poster isn't a paid game designer and is thus inferior), elitist rules conservatism ('the rule as it is worked great for me, and I've been playing for 72 years!'), GM fiat ('you don't need rules for that, the GM should just make stuff up'), or even a sort of vague confusion on what house rules are ('but if you change that, things won't be the same!').

Oddly, it's worse the more broken the rule is. I posted a suggestion on making the Link +10% enhancement in GURPS cheaper, on the SJ Games forum and got a few people mildly upset but no real discussion on the rule. On the other hand, the threads on modifying some of the most obviously broken rules I've seen in gaming result in massive flame wars and arguments (Scion is the one that comes to mind most easily, with its haphazard nightmare of bad rules built into an otherwise great game.)

The best I can tell, this happens because if you say something is really broken, everyone that's used the broken rules (slogged through it, carefully avoided breaking it, or even just happily went along with the weirder results) feels threatened if you point out how broken it is, because you're in some sense telling them their game was 'wrong'.

I suppose that's a problem with any form of constructive criticism.

Revisiting Old Thoughts

This blog is still young, and built pretty haphazardly. A post here, a post there, and almost no pattern or sense to them. As I mentioned before, there are lots of incomplete thoughts.

My current unfinished business includes:

• Rul-Skaath, which has a variety of posts near the beginning of the blog, but is still not even the bare bones of a system. This one I'll definitely return to at some point, I just can't be sure when.
  
• The Games I Play -- I reviewed the ones I hate the most, but what about the mediocre and the good? I should get around to that sometime.
• The Changeling-esque oath system. It doesn't interest me as much when I'm not playing around with a game that uses it. The best odds for me ever finishing it are if I do some kind of fae-oriented GURPS game or something, or if someone actually requests it.
• The random thoughts on that other game I didn't start. Not sure if I'll use it or not, but I'm going to hang on to it. It may or may not see development in the future.
  

Getting an RPG Moving

Running and playing various Roleplaying games, I've encountered one really annoying recurrent problem: players simply talking about the game, rather than playing it. This seems especially true in sandbox-style games, and especially games where players have lots of options.

Players sort of go off on daydreams... 'I could go on quests until I have enough money to start my own village, and then set myself up as the local ruler, and train my villagers in martial arts, and...' And an hour goes by, of the player considering options. Meanwhile, the character is still a peasant with a rusty sword inherited from his father, or whatever. Because for all those thought-exercises and dreams, nothing has actually happened in-game.

And with those players, sometimes if you press them... make them decide to do something, they go 'Okay, uh. I look for a quest.' A sort of noncommittal, general declaration. That doesn't help me much, because then not only do I have to do my job as the game master (deciding the world's reaction to your actions and such), I have to do the player's job too (deciding what your actions actually are), with the player only contributing vague goals.

That's no fun.

If you're a player in a 'sandbox' situation, I suggest taking matters into your own hands. Don't paint your actions in broad, vague strokes. Give active details, to make it feel like something is happening in the game and to give the GM something to play with. Rather than, 'I go look around town', have your character actually walk out of the team's base, mount his horse, and ride into town. Tie the horse to a post somewhere and go into the local tavern. Buy a round of drinks for everyone if you need to. Just... do stuff.

You're Above Average

There's a statistic floating around that gets quoted sometimes, that on average, most people believe themselves to be above average intelligence. It's true that some people tend to think more highly of themselves than they probably should. But... I think there's some validity to thinking your intelligence is above average.

The logic goes like this:

We don't have a good and proper definition of intelligence. There are all sorts of kinds of intelligence. Since there are so many, odds are any given person is pretty good at some kind of intelligence.

Everyone gets to pick what matters to them. As any RPG min-maxer knows, you can usually find a way to bend the situation to suit your greatest attribute. So... most people will look at the world, and live in the world, through the lens of whatever they're best at. And they're probably above average in whatever that thing is.

So.

The 'everyone thinks they're above average' statistic often gets used as an example of rampant delusion. I think there's some truth to it, sure (some people are simply delusional), but I don't think it's a completely fair assumption.

In the way that matters to you, you probably are better than most people. And if you're not... well, examine yourself. Figure out your strengths. Because odds are you have an untapped advantage of some sort.