Balance and fun in RPGs

Hi my first longer post, this

I recently read in a comment to an article on cracked about vintage games (can't find the article now,sorry) that older rpg games were horribly imbalanced f.ex. Bard's Tale where in the beginning all melee characters do the fighting while later sorcerers wipe out whole bands of enemies.

But I FOUND THE GAME TO BR FUN, I played BTII and BTIII as much as Ultima 4/5/6 and Alternate Reality The Dungeon (which probably were as imba as BT!!!) for hours, days, weeks, months on end. Ok, those games didn't have great graphics like today's games, but the spirit, the soul and all between gamer and game was somehow more intense, more easy to get in to.

Som maybe it's not as important as some people think for an RPG game to be balanced? What do you think?

 

Consult this thread for answers and enlightenment: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-fun-obsidians-project-eternity-thread.75947/

 

Since when? At least half the registered users on the Dex are Prosper alts.

 

Balance is overrated in single-player games, moderation is underrated in the Codex.

/thread.

 

Balance is bland but imbalance is impeccable fun!

 

Fun is not allowed in RPGs.

 

Hey,son,this is the story of my life !

REALLY Im thought this funny, anyway i talked o JarlFrank and he said the same to me, and I PROMISED I wouldn't post one-liners again, and so I created this thread.



Infinitron: THANKS for the massive IGNORE list of some users now

 

Overrated by whom? Fans? Developers? I'm not seeing large numbers from either group.

 

The entirety of fun in RPGs is finding the most horribly broken thing and exploiting the hell and back out of it.

 

Both.

As they say, the worst blind is the one that doesn't want to see.

 

I think the opposite. Finding out that there is a single way to make the entire experience a sneeze can break the immersion, which is partly created by the feeling that you're operating in something that actually resembles a reality of some sort, and the rules are just means given to you so you can express yourself.

When you discover that one way is more efficient then others, suddenly this "expression of yourself" stops being a natural thing to do. It's now a conscious decision. A sacrifice. It's now artificial.

I don't like breaking my rpgs. There are games that can still remain very fun after this treatment (because they're great no matter how flawed they are), but it's rarely as much fun playing them again.

 

People who think that balance equals blandness are confusing correlation and causation.

/thisoldstupiddiscussion

 

Sometimes developers balance things in patches stupidly. Like when Harebrained Schemes gave kneecap an excessively hard nerf and had to backpedal a bit on it in a future patch.

Of course they didn't/couldn't/wouldn't fix the fundamental balance flaws of their quasi-sim failure of a system.

 

Balance is super hard. If one thing is simply better than another thing, it's not balanced, but it's realistic. A muzzle-loader isn't going to be as great as a bolt-action rifle for combat purposes, for instance. But if you go for the realistic approach, you find yourself in a situation where certain options are, well, better than others, and there's no reason to do anything else - simply because of practicality. Shooting someone with a fireball from fifty meters away is just more practical than charging them with a sword and hoping for the best. So, why not make a wizard every time you play a certain game?

Usually there's some sort of tradeoff in exchange, to make using other options more palatable. But then you run into the issue of either making the trade-off too lax or too harsh. Wizards in DnD 3.5e are A) entirely superior to all other core classes and B) supposed to be limited by their Vancian casting system and have to focus on not running out of spells or magical items as they go through dungeons, making the greatest weakness of a wizard a battle of attrition (though there are many ways to reduce this weakness to negligibility). This is meant to make it so that fighters and other classes have an endurance advantage, and it succeeds... sometimes. Maybe the DM lets the party rest a lot (far too common mistake). Maybe the DM throws monsters that are especially dangerous to nonmagical classes at the party a lot. Maybe the DM doesn't give other classes enough magical items for their level (another common mistake). Maybe the wizard discovered one of many ways to rules lawyer his way into having a huge reservoir of spells. The point is, it's such a non factor at decent levels that wizards turn into one man armies that can do everything everyone else does better than them except healing.

There's the opposite end of the spectrum, too, where something that is superior to most other things gets a tradeoff so brutal that it is inferior to most of them instead. Maybe the DM gives every player except the wizard insane amounts of magical items and never lets the party rest, leaving the wizard without any chances to recover his spells. Maybe the DM throws monsters highly resistant to magic at the party a lot. Maybe the wizard's player isn't a powergaming douchebag and didn't do everything in his power to make his character unstoppable, so that these little things become a lot more exacerbated. Then the wizard is essentially a goddamn NPC Scholar class! That's not balanced at all!

Perhaps the most obvious implementation of all this is fighting games, where every character has a different movelist, different attributes, and so on. The thing that seems universal is that faster characters, with more mobility, are better than slower ones. Many efforts have been made to make slower characters more viable and attain a better balance between the roster, but they usually all fall short. Even the best designed fighting games end up with tiers of characters which become apparent within the tournament scene.

How does this relate to fun? I think it goes both ways. Terribly balanced games can be fun simply because they're terribly balanced and exploiting the balance issues can be fun for some people (like Call of Duty online multiplayer where bullshit like sprinting around the map and knifing everyone is a legitimate tactic). Well-balanced games, on the other hand, can be fun for people who like relatively fair challenges (like Chess (yes I know the person who goes first in Chess has like a 5% higher chance of winning)). Different people like different games, and different people like different kinds of balances. After all, if everything was truly balanced, there would be literally no difference between any option (all weapons would have the same stats, all classes would have the same options, etc.) and that wouldn't be very much fun at all, because there would be no variety.

This is all just my two cents.

 

There must be ridiculously powerful shit available in a game or it'll probably be pretty bland. Every option available shouldn't be equally applicable in every situation. The usual issue is though that the enemies won't use the good stuff, so the player is left without challenge. Balance between the player and the AI is needed - balance between different weapons, spells, abilities, not so much, even if it's desirable that everything in the game has some sensible niche.

 

Having access to retardedly overpowered stuff = banalshitboring easy game = waste of time, go masturbate instead.

 

What does balance means in single player game

Does is mean all choice same??? bad

Or does it mean less choice boring??? ok

 

Balance this, balance that. Fucking druid treehuggers everywhere.

 

I favor (single player) games that are not perfectly balanced with everything being equally powerful and useful.

It just increases the fun when you can choose to play some class or race that is simply harder to play, either in certain situations or generally.
Same goes for character choices that make the game easier.

Take roguelikes, for example. In most of these games, some classes make the game as easy as it gets (with roguelikes, anyway), while other classes tend to be very hard throughout the game. And to me, that is a huge part of the fun. Playing each of them and see how far I can get. Usually, I have most fun playing the harder ones, but sometimes I want to steamroll my way through the dungeons.

Another great example for this is Warlords Battlecry 3 (RTS, for those who don't know). The game has 16 (I think) races and 29 classes for your main character. Needless to say, this is not perfectly balanced. And again, this is what makes it so fun. Try playing a very fragile class combined with a slow starting race. Now that's a challenge! Or play a merchant (more resources, cheaper units) combined with any swarm-like race (many units, cheap on their own). Natural synergy. Have fun stomping the map in no time. Some races also just have an easier/harder time against other races. Makes sense and again, increases fun.
This doesn't mean there is no balance at all. But there are clearly better and worse choices for your race/class setup concerning difficulty.

Of course, not being perfectly balanced makes competitive multiplayer a very hard thing to do right. But it does not make it impossible (you could limit ranked matches to certain race vs. race setups, introduce different leagues for different match types, etc.) and also I don't usually play MP in games that are IMO meant to be SP so I don't really care what happens in MP. Diablo 3, for example, would be so much more interesting if not every class was equally easy and your character choices would actually matter. Then again, balancing might be one of least problems of that game.

 

I don't understand why is this discussion so prominent in the codex. Balance and fun have nothing to do with each other. A balanced game can be fun or shitty depending on many factors and the same can be said for the contrary.
Also, hi!

 

Hi.

Well you are right that balance (or the lack of) is not the single determining factor of fun. But it is one of the more influential ones, I'd say.

 

I'm not so sure about that but I guess it's hard to prove 'cause fun is so damn subjective...