From Ari Marmell's blog:

Quote from: Ari MarmellI don’t really houserule anymore.

There was a time, a while back—a long while back—when I houseruled my games so far up the wazoo that it was practically a delve in and of itself. (Which now gives me images of a party of adventurers investigating the twists and turns of a giant colon and series of intestines, which is utterly disgusting and must therefore appear in one of my future campaigns so that I may spread my misery.)

(NOTE: The rest of this article has been snipped at the request of the IP holder)

Interesting read.

Houserules make a ruleset yours. I believe in this whole heartedly. I do not subscribe to the, "the designer knows best" mantra. Even though i have had a hand in designing myself.

Clash, back me up here!

I agree with you. Reading this, I kept thinking "The RAW's my bitch, and I intend to keep it that way".

Quote from: One Horse Town;384456Houserules make a ruleset yours. I believe in this whole heartedly. I do not subscribe to the, "the designer knows best" mantra.

I don't believe the designer knows best and the industry seems insistent on repeatedly demonstrating this to me of late.

I will say I house rule much less than I used to not because I don't frequently feel the need (because I do), but because it seems like a bit too much hassle to manage a set of expansion rules for a game. There is something to be said for a printed, organized rulebook or set of rules that makes it so I really have to feel it's important to houserule something.

Which is still quite a bit, just not as much as "the old days".

As I don't believe RPG rules can be balanced (only individual campaigns can be -- and probably only campaigns with a specific GM and set of players can truly be balanced), the whole post just has me scratching my head as I can't really understand the "rules balance is the ultimate thing in game design" mindset the author has adopted.

Heck, I can't even wrap my mind around the idea that balance is nearly as important as it seems to be in many modern RPG worlds. Perfectly balanced worlds are generally boring and such worlds certainly certainly lack a feeling of realism. Games need to have a level enough playing field for the characters that all the players in the game can have fun. But that's are the "balance" that's required and what is needed will vary from group to group as different players want/need different things.

I have no problem house-ruling any game I'm going to run. If the house-rules cause problems, I can tweak them just as I would the designer-written rules. My rules are any more likely to be prefect than the ones in the book, after all. However, changes are they will be a better fit for my campaign and my players.

Being a gamer doesn't automatically make you a hobbyist.  

I don't have a problem with either group or their approaches to play, especially since most people fall between extremes.

I'm just saying, if you houserule something...and play it that way for years...and no one ever has a problem with it...it's as balanced as it needs to be.

Note: This is meant generally, but is a response specifically to the spellcasting houserule quoted in the OP.

I like the fiddle with mechanics as much as the next guy but I tend to reserve that to when I work on my own homebrew stuff in FUDGE. FUDGE lends itself very well to creating new mechanics and sub-systems.

However if I buy a commercial game I'd rather be able to play it out of the box and trust that it won't leave me hanging. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

With Gamma World I had to houserule the hell out of the game, partly because the rules were a bit of a mess but mostly because the default assumptions about how the game should be played didn't really gel with how I wanted to play it. So there was a fundamentally mismatch there. In theory I would have probably been better off running an entirely different post-apocalypse game but it's not as there was a huge choice at the time and the Gamma World setting itself has its special charm.

By contrast Marvel Super Heroes (to use another old TSR game as an example) I played very much as written. I think the only house rule I adopted was to counter the somewhat overpowered armour rules - and even then this was a houserule suggested to me on this forum so it hardly counts as tinkering.

I guess I kinda went thru a simular bit to ari.

I used to really love my houserules and making them and fidgeting and learning about other people's houserules and all that jazz.

But then I guess about a year before 4th was announced (as the culimation of a trend that really started affecting me about the time 3.5 came out) I started doing it less, expecting it less, respecting it less. I saw it as a barrier to the game.

As a result my games became a little more approachable I like to think, because my game could be found in the books, as apposed to half written down , half in my head, a constant redesigning that no one could actually make out most of the time.

As for balance whats not to like about it? You want to ditch balance, lets replace all the white pawns with queens and let the boot start with 15 million dollars in monopoly ( I always play the boot and white in chess). Balance in rules can result in balance in play (not just numerically , but also in terms of being able to contribute and direct the story and in terms of "screentime" and "cool guy moments" and all that). I just see no good argument for not rationing and ensuring an equal distribution of these things. The quality of my fictive world might be less, you mean my stories may not be so good? What a lot of swine swill.

Ari's article expresses the difference between RPG-as-finished-product vs. RPG-as-toolkit-to-make-shit.

Quote from: Logos7;384475As for balance whats not to like about it?

It's unrealistic. It's like the difference between a minis wargame where you pick your troops with points and each side has a equal number of points and a minis wargame where you are trying to duplicate the starting point of a real world battle. Battles between almost perfectly equal sides are very uncommon in history.

I knew a guy back in the 1970s who almost always won at the a set piece/point balanced ancients battle, but had a great deal of trouble winning in a historical scenario -- as they weren't balanced.

My RPG campaigns are about pretending to be a character in a world that feels real and the more balance there is, the less real the world usually feels.

But balance in a wargame sense and balance in an RPG design sense mean two different things, and don't necessarily work at odds with eachother.

If I give spellcasters fatigue or force them to make other sacrifices in order to use powerful spells, this in essence could balance them against fighters because of the risks involved, all while adding flavor to the game-world.

There are different approaches for how to handle balance in RPG design, but I don't think balance is necessarily pitted directly against lack of flavor or verisimilitude.

Quote from: Logos7;384475As for balance whats not to like about it? You want to ditch balance, lets replace all the white pawns with queens and let the boot start with 15 million dollars in monopoly ( I always play the boot and white in chess).

Because blatant freakin' false dichotomies make your point... NOT!

Balance is a good goal. The problem comes when you get neurotic about balance and suck the fun out of the game in the process. Further, assumptions about what is balanced at one GMs table is not balanced at another, because different challenges and focus points exist in the game. (And if different challenges don't exist in the game as a whole, the game is freaking boring.)

Quote from: Peregrin;384480There are different approaches for how to handle balance in RPG design, but I don't think balance is necessarily pitted directly against lack of flavor or verisimilitude.

No, it doesn't automatically do so, but when taken to the extremes mentioned in the original blog post, I think it does. The author admits to not doing things that could be fun and or interesting because they can't be balanced with rules. If "rules balance" is you highest priory, then I think flavor and verisimilitude are going to suffer. Flavor and verisimilitude are much more important than rules balance to me.

Quote from: Logos7;384475As for balance whats not to like about it?

Well, Ari Marmell has his own take about this:

QuoteAnd the problem is, once Balance became a major part of my process, in terms of creating RPG materials, I lost the ability to turn it off. I can’t just make random, spur-of-the-moment tweaks—I can’t run with every idea that comes to mind, no matter how cool—without first examining it carefully to see if it’s broken, or looking for unanticipated consequences.

Sure, in some ways that’s a good thing. I mean, it’s not as though we want broken elements in our games. It’s one of the most troubling things as a DM, to introduce something that your players really like—a spell, a magic item, a house rule, whatever—and then to realize, later, that we have to either take it away or suck up the fact that our campaign is permanently out of whack. Believe me, I’m not decrying balance as a design goal.

But at the same time, it’s difficult, and it’s limiting. When every house rule, every tweak and change, needs to be examined and studied and then perfectly designed, it often becomes more trouble than it’s worth. It’s just easier to go with the RAW, even when you think the game might be better moving beyond those particular parameters. The question doesn’t become “Will the game be more fun if I change X or add Y?” but rather “Will it be fun enough to justify the hassle of implementing said changes?” Unless the answer is a blatant yes, it’s just easier to err on the side of inertia.

And yes, it’s somewhat creatively limiting. Even as a vocal champion of balance in D&D, I don’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes, a really cool idea just can’t be mechanically balanced—either because it’s overpowered (or under) by its very nature, or because it’s too open-ended to be numerically quantified. (The 3E version of polymorph—and especially the higher-level variants—are perfect examples of this.) So either you add them anyway, and accept the innate imbalance, or you reject an otherwise really cool/interesting idea because it can’t be balanced. I usually go with the latter, myself, precisely because—now that Balance has its hooks in my mind—I find myself uncomfortable with the other option. I fret over it, and it bugs at me, until it’s simply not worth the trouble. But I’ll readily admit, I miss the days when I wasn’t so hung up on keeping things balanced, when I could throw the wild and wacky into the game without ever worrying about it.

This has, much as I hate to admit it, been an issue for me—thankfully, only on rare occasions—in my professional endeavors as well. While I’m happy with the majority of my mechanical work on both 3E and 4E, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times where I failed to get a concept across—or, on occasion, even abandoned a concept entirely—because I couldn’t find a way to make it work in any mechanically balanced sense. I’m working on learning to move past that, to take more mechanical chances, but it’s not easy.

It's only like... about half his post.

But anyway. That's all built on a very bad premise: that rules balance actually is the balance of the game as it is played. "The rules are the game. The game is the rules".

And this premise is completely, utterly wrong, nothing more than a marketing tool that should IMO be buried to the ground, or better, burned alive in a million flamewars all over the internet until just cinders remain out of it.

First, "The notion that somehow all characters should be strictly equal all the time whatever the circumstances is laughable. If you exclude circumstances, whether they are theoretically equal or not doesn't matter once the rubber hits the road in-game. Any way you slice it, strictissimo, hardcore rules balance is a misguided design tenet, at best."

i.e. rules balance exists in a vacuum. Actual game situations vary all the time, players of the game vary all the time (in their intelligence, willingness to participate, proactive behavior, understanding of the rules, thinking outside the box etc etc), DMs and their skills (both as they pertain to the rules, or not, as they pertain to social interactions, fairness, role playing, and any other areas in which the DM's input matters for the particular situation to be resolved) vary all the time, and so on, so forth. This rule will be used more than that rule in any particular situation. Ergo, hardcore rules balance in a vacuum is a joke.

Second, even if absolute rules balance actually did represent something more than an abstract concept and could be achieved, it would STILL NOT constitute actual game balance. Why? Because a game is more than the sum of its rules. Precisely because game situations are made of social interactions, varying circumstances, different rules being emphasized with different situations, and so on, so forth.

In the end? The whole notion gets just one thing done: sell more books. Who cares if it limits the imagination of the players of the game to the parameters defined by the game? This is, to me, personally, ludicrous, profoundly stupid, and ends up destroying the creativity that made role playing games special in the first place, back when they were games "requiring no game board because the action took place in the player's imagination".

Pardon the rant. It's all IMO, personally, YMMV and all that.