Editorial Josh Sawyer Explains: How to Balance an RPG

[Grotesque]

"Paraplegic explains how to win marathon."

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/marathon_do

 

[Shevek]

Good article

 

[ZagorTeNej]

I predict it will take roughly 12 minutes for hardcore optimizers to develop the clearly optimal builds for the melee, artillery and healer/buffer roles in PoE.

Yeah, all of them being gym rats for starters.

 

[FeelTheRads]

When someone says "Remember those games you didn't like? They weren't fun" I nod my head respectfully like nodding man. Feels good to be the target market of a game with role playing for once.

When someone says "Remember those games you didn't like?" I realize that I don't because I don't typically play games I don't like and I certainly don't go crying to the developers to make the games for me instead.

Also fun that you're considering yourself the target market of a kind of game that supposedly wasn't done before. Must feel very special to be the target market of imaginary games.

 

[Haba]

Best game designer on the planet. Iä Josh Sawyer, baby goat with a thousand won.

That's funny, since the worst part of PoE Beta is the game design.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I certainly don't go crying to the developers to make the games for me instead.

There's only a handful of quality studios around.

Many hungry gamers and an industry that supplies only a handful of teats to suckle from.

Crying is the only strategy many gamers have for even the slimmest of chances to be fed.

 

[Pope Amole II]

He's probrably the best game designer working on RPGs atm.

Styg is better.

As for the article - glimpsed through it because I can't be bothered to read it all, but in single player rpgs balance doesn't matter at all. What truly matters is variability, the amount of actually different builds and strategies. It's ok if one build is weaker than another as long as it offers something truly different (my fallout LPs showcase that well, I think). This must be the cornerstone of RPG design, not the balancing shit. True, there should be no broken and pointless things, as they don't contribute anything to the table, but as long as everything works and is more or less capable of taking down the enemies, it's fine.

 

[Zed]

While big RPGs always let a few of these trash options slip through unintentionally, the best way to avoid the problem on a large scale is simply to ask why well-informed players, acting with eyes wide open, would want to pick any given option over a different option in the first place. There should be a good conceptual/aesthetic reason as well as a good mechanical reason.

yet it feels like every option in PoE except background and culture are combat mechanical.

In the end, we not only want to make the option viable, we want to maintain its concept and spirit. We could take a sledgehammer and tune up its attack speed so it attacks incredibly quickly with low-damage hits. That might make it viable, but we've strayed significantly from what most people would expect a sledgehammer to be good at: slow, heavy hits.

yeah "might" is very true to its concept and spirit.
it's either a bastardized 'strength' where the generalized damage increase doesn't make sense, OR it's a new concept that puts the power of a character being into one attribute. either way, it sucks.

maybe the bottom line is that obsidian's opinion on what is conceptually and spiritually true differs from the opinion of fans of D&D IE games.

Additionally, sometimes players simply don't like the balance choices we make. We're trying to satisfy hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of players. We can't suit everyone's tastes, so modding is a great way for players to experiment with game development and create their own personal "cut" of a game they love.

you only need to satisfy your backers, as promised.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

And I also can't help thinking of subsequent playthroughs on BG2 etc where I used some pretty unusual and gimped characters. Sure it wasn't balanced but it was quirky and fun and I guess Sawyer sees sub-optimal possibilities as something to be exterminated at all costs.

Yes, part of the fun in replaying IWD for instance was trying to do it with a strange party mixes, or with only one or two multi-classed characters. I am not sure PoE would be as fun to experiment in that way. The more I know, the more I see D&D was actually a pretty good and fun system. Oh, well.

also, you know who else saw sub-optimal possibilities as something to be exterminated at all costs?

 

[Crooked Bee]

That old title for the PoE thread, "Josh Sawyer kills fun", or "destroys fun", or whatever it was - hilariously spot on. Who wrote that?

That was me, based on this post by Jasede. I simply picked "Sawyer wants to end" and "fun" from that post and put them together. Oh, and I was also inspired by felipe's post after that one, no doubt.

Crooked Bee Infinitron

I think the quote was in one of your copy pastes. Does it ring a bell with either of you?

Nope, no idea, sorry.

 

[crawlkill]

It's sad that this is even a conversation that needs to be had at this point. Of course it was awful that you could run simple statistical models on D&D weapon classes and easily discover that one was uniformally better than another in all circumstances. Decisions should be clear, and all avenues should be viable all the way through the game. What's the point of every vendor in Baldur's Gate having leather armor when no one would ever wear it after they no longer had to? Why didn't leather armor have its upsides along with its downsides? I refuse to believe that everyone doesn't already know this. Even the nerds who built 4E D&D understood this. It's a pretty basic concept. The desire for one track of specialization to be inherently superior to another goes back to badly-designed D&D stats. Bitches should not be worshiping at that altar.

And a serious +1 over getting rid of/downplaying passive damage avoidance. The amount of math it takes to understand which is better at what ranges, particularly when you're facing enemies whose math doesn't function the same way, is obscene, and I swear to you none of the people who value systems like that have ever actually DONE those statistics (well, high-end MMO players do, but their opponents generally all use the same formulas to attack, which is not the case in an IE-style game). Damage reduction and giving everyone an HP pool to reflect a no-dodge-just-reduction environment is way more graspable.

 

[eremita]

Calm down guys, if this game fails, we still have Dragon Age Inquisition as an option. This year is truly great for RPGs!

 

[Roguey]

Lovin' the grog tears itt.

I don't typically play games I don't like and I certainly don't go crying to the developers to make the games for me instead.

Considering the amount of posts you've made about PoE, I don't believe you.

 

[Delterius]

Calm down guys, if this game fails, we still have D:OS as an option. This year is truly great for RPGs!

 

[Infinitron]

Lovin' the grog tears itt.

Plenty more where that came from you-know-where.

Come on, take it to the next level. People aren't even talking about the actual beta gameplay anymore anyway. They're whining about the core design.

 

[Roguey]

Plenty more where that came from you-know-where.

Come on, take it to the next level. People aren't even talking about the actual beta gameplay anymore anyway. They're whining about the core design.

The broad strokes and big picture are fine, but I'm not interested in the details. I'm not going full-Daedalos. They'll either address their concerns or they won't.

 

[CyberP]

"Ideally, each type of character build has its own strengths and weaknesses throughout the game's content, but ultimately ALL character builds should feel viable in different ways. No player wants to spend 40 hours working toward a dead-end build. Similarly, few players want to accidentally discover that their fundamental character concept is an unspoken "easy mode" through the game."
-JES

Agreed.

"If the game is balanced around the always-picked option, the game is imbalanced for anything but that option."

And this.

But I still don't agree that there should be no trash options at all when it comes to every single choice in an RPG, but it's not clear if JES is referring to every single choice in an RPG or just in core RPG systems, correct me if I'm wrong.

""Trash" or "trap" options are a time-honored tradition in RPGs, both tabletop and computer. Trash options are choices that are intentionally designed to be bad, or that don't get enough attention during development and testing to actually be viable in the game.

It is now 2014 and, friends, I am here to tell you that trash options are bullshit."

Every damn choice in your game, or just core systems? This distinction is important. If just core systems, then I agree, but certainly not for every choice: Trash options are fine in dialogue, various different types of items can be trash options, and this can include weapons and armour (though you generally want most to have their uses) and so on. Trash options add strategy, because the player intends to avoid them. So you don't want to carry 10 rusty daggers of burning butthurt +2, avoid carrying that trashy dagger. You don't want to pick the dialogue option that will anger the NPC when your goal is to make friends with him, and so on.
Core PnP-inspired systems such as skills, attributes, traits and what have you? Yeah, it's certainly worth obsessing over balance to the latter, trash options are bullshit here as players are often asked conceptualize the character you want to build right at the very start, when you have no clear idea of exactly how the systems work and whether or not they are balanced.

 

[Infinitron]

The butthurt has reached GameBanshee: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/114286-josh-sawyer-on-how-to-balance-an-rpg.html

Who's Q?

 

[Zed]

The butthurt has reached GameBanshee: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/114286-josh-sawyer-on-how-to-balance-an-rpg.html

what a shithole

 

[Black_Willow]

Funny to see Sawyer to follow Guild Wars 2 design principles.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

If everything is special, nothing is.

 

[Jasede]

Most of the fun of CRPGs of old was finding out what was better than other things and experimenting with new builds and parties, optimizing steadily.

 

[Pope Amole II]

Y'know, I've skimmed through the article once again (not read it, just skimmed) and one thing it utterly failes to mention is the in-game mechanics. Which is kinda logical in a perverted sence of thinking because RPGs never have good economies so why bother, but, if you want to push pseudo-logical constructs like "padded armor is light so you hit faster, plate is heavy so you're slow" (which is kinda bullshit - you get tired faster, but you don't behave like a cripple in either chain or plate), you also need to look in the reasons for those kinds of armors being actually existing.

Even if we throw apart the different historical periods factors (which are ususally ignored in the RPGs), the point is, Padded Armor wasn't use because it allowed you to have +8 modifier to the dexterity. It also wasn't used because you could've swung faster in it. It was used because you were poor as fuck and, well, having it is better than fighting General Butt-Naked style. Correspondingly, Plate Armor wasn't the magical impregnable fortress that people paint it to be. It offered better protection, sure, but it wasn't that much better than the chainmail and so in terms of cost efficiency. Let's not forget it was worth a fortune and you could've armed, like, a dozen of men for that cost (who would totally overpower 1 plate armoured knight). Well, I'm kinda pulling the precise number out of ass here, but you get the drift. But it was used more due to the fact that resurrection scrolls were not easily available and life was somewhat precious, not to mention that knights were also supposed to be less mega tanks and more, like, officers (at least in non-retarded armies), so you've paid extra for your precious health and preservation of the chain of command.

And regional differences also played a huge role. The scarcity of iron ore and so forth. Or even the fucking ideology - the Crusades were the conflict of a straight swords vs curved swords and, despite the fact that the curved ones are much more effective for the cavalry, that was zealously disputed by the european broadsword admirers. Damn, I believe in some times and places you could've been easily killed just for wearing the wrong kind of armor or bearing the improper weapon. And we also forget the creation/maintainance tax at some weapons & armor. And just the fact that weapons were breaking constantly and you often needed not new ones because they were stronger, but simply because you've destroyed all you had already (and repairing them wasn't the simple issue of just pounding them with a hammer).

And that's the kind of shit you need to implement in your rpgs, not the balancing crap. Sure, pure realism is stupid in a fantasy game, but let's say you're about to fact a bunch of armor-devouring acid-spitters - certainly wearing some kind of disposable shit armor against them would be better than wasting a precious suit of plate mail (which may be worth more than the treasure they guard). But then, can you actually survive that in the shit armor? That was already implemented in the Darklands, btw, to a certain extent (dragon fights).

 

[thesheeep]

If everything is special, nothing is.

Exactly, I don't like balanced to death systems. Not in single player (or co-op) games at least. I can understand the need in competitive games, of course.
Sure, everything should be viable somehow, but I am convinced that differences in effectiveness make things more interesting as they allow players define some challenge on their own.

Like "Yeah, now I'm going to play a greataxe wielding orc bard focused on bluffing for the challenge!" in D&D.

 

[Infinitron]

It offered better protection, sure, but it wasn't that much better than the chainmail and so in terms of cost efficiency.

Sure, and the classic trope is that Padded or Leather Armor is cheap, and found in the early game, while Plate is expensive, and in many games for some reason only found in the late game. Like in Diablo.

However, I thought that kind of MMO-esque tier-based design was frowned upon here. And in a more realistic fantasy roleplaying world, there's no reason why you couldn't steal a suit of plate off of the first village blacksmith you run into, thereby bypassing leather entirely.