I am still writing up Mission 2, running a little behind schedule there.
So I thought I might comment on something that I read in another Blog.
I was reading Chad Perrin’s blog re: Running high level ROLLplaying games.
On the subject of character capabilities he wrote;
the really important factor isn’t balance — it’s value. You want all the players to feel like their characters are valuable somehow, that they contribute to the quality of the roleplaying experience in some indispensable manner.
If this quote has no meaning to you stop reading now.
Running a game in Bandit Country is sort of like high level fantasy gaming or even superhero gaming. There is no pretense that the characters are average joes. They often carry military grade hardware and know how to use it. They can do crazy-scary stuff with computers. They can out improvise MacGyver. How to develop stories that challenge them? Answer: go to elaborate extremes to balance the characters with perks and flaws, point based stat buy and skill balancing. Balance them. Make them differently balanced. Equally exceptional.
I am stating right here that I think this is a shit way of running a game. It saps fun and adds work for the GM. All those balanced encounters that you have to consider. Get rid of them.
Let me qualify my statement. The level playing field is an excellent method if your goal is to publish roleplaying products. Disparate folks who have never met before can identify straight away with your 5th level D&D character 0r your 100pt GURPS dude.
I guess that a kind of anti-industry theme is arising in this and some of my prior posts. I am not against the industry of roleplaying, of writers making an income out of producing materials used in our hobby. Who wouldn’t want to be able to trade on their imagination? I do, however, think that there is a big difference between the business of roleplaying and the experience of roleplaying.
What do you gain by balancing your game in terms of character capabilities and the challenges that they meet?
Why wouldn’t a 10th level Paladin want to hang out with a bunch of level 2 newbs? If you want to talk heroic, do you think that Frodo and Legolas were the same level at any point in the Lord of the Rings? Did having the One Ring balance him up to Legolas? What about cop stories? Were Detectives Riggs and Murtaugh of Lethal Weapon fame equally balanced? How about Rorschach and Night Owl in Watchmen? Dr Manhattan?
To paraphrase Chad, they all were able to contribute to their story in some indespensible way.
Encourage your Players to create indispensable Characters. Dispose of level playing field thinking. What sort of drama is there in a story where the players know that any challenge their characters meet was designed for them to overcome? What fun is it as a GM to have to retrofit your creativity to suit homogeneous characters?
Flood the Level Playing Field with laughter and tears. Sink or swim, your players will value their characters and you will have made a fundamental change to the way you game.
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depends on the definition or useage (if you will) of the word “balance”.
Of course then we need metrics to gauge this since people dont actually walk around with their class and level tattooed on their foreheads.
The point is valid, but seems so subjective that consensus is nearly impossible.
I’m with Donny. Please define what you mean by “balance”. If you mean “All characters able to do exactly the same things”, then sure, I catch your drift.
But your basic argument works better for narratives than it does for shared games. Frodo and Sam never had to sit for 3 hours while Aragorn rolled out the epic battle with the Ringwraiths, and Riggs didn’t have to sit through an evening of Murtaugh acting out his family life. Hell, when Dr Manhattan joined the party, Rorschach and Nite Owl left it…
Soooo… I catch your drift, but I’d rather be able to clearly gauge the level of challenge I’m throwing at my players, and be sure that they can all contribute actively and positively.
What is `balance’?
Good question. It is subjective.
To answer your question. I define balance as the term for all that work that you as a GM can do if you want to ensure that your game is predictable.
Robin Laws writes about one aspect of balance in his most recent See Page XX article.
He does a `compare and contrast’ between the balance approaches of D&D4E and GUMSHOE. He then goes on to discuss “story oriented” linking of the balanced (in this case combat encounter) elements in reference to occupying a common conceptual / narrative gaming space. Softening and merging the highly metric experience of combat with the highly conceptual experience of roleplaying/ representing a character.
I wrote this post as a response to Chads post because I found that it really resonated with my own feelings about what makes a rewarding session of roleplaying. I write here about `balance’ as a metric tool used by the GM to gauge the sort of challenges and stories to present to the Players. Regardless of the RPG system used. Some Systems hardwire balance metrics more than others. It is how the GM uses and applies these that is important.
Using these metrics (whatever they are, depending on the system being used) to create an adventure/mission/session of roleplaying is like designing a car with 5 reverse gears and 1 forward. The first time that your players encounter a challenge that is perfectly designed just for them will be fresh and exciting. Hey, we had just the right combination of skills and talents to deal with the big bad. Who would have thought! The second time, kinda cool. The third time? Fourth time? etc.
So what I mean is, throw that shit to the wind. Let it go. The basic and assumed conceit of quite a few games is that the PCs start small and happen to live in a small pond, little fishies. As they get more capable they find their way to successively bigger ponds until they are Lords of the Ocean. The matrics of the game are designed around this common assumption.
What if you ignore that. Does every challenge have to be winnable? As a GM, are you creating a memorable story by spending your time writing encounters that the PCs can scrape through. Wow, that was close. Whew, just made it through that one too! To me that starts to be like computer games where the health pack just happens to be on the other side of the room full of zombies. If you go through the portal and see the chain gun sitting in the middle of a wide plaza, you know that the moment you pick it up all hell will break loose. Writing to these assumptions and playing within them becomes predictable. Predictable isn’t fun.
The irony is that, as a GM, writing to this template is very intensive. It takes a lot of time to carefully ensure that the challenge is exactly at the cusp of character capability. One micron from the tipping point.
Let me finish with a couple of questions of my own.
What is the economy of this approach to creating a story? Who gains? Has it made the experience of GMing your game easier or harder? Are game mechanics, their assumptions and inbuilt limitations, a functional tool for creating a story? When you write and prepare for your gaming sessions, do you write to these mechanics or do you write your story and then apply the mechanics? These questions are rhetorical and all I ask is that you consider them and the answers in terms of whether they are the best solution to creating value in your own game.
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