Quote from: tenbones on February 25, 2025, 10:56:42 AMRifts. It has zero "balance" in class construction, rules consistency*, or narrative balance of the setting.

Yet, it's been actively played, and is still going strong for decades. I'd suspect its more popular now than ever.

Now I'm sure there are those here that don't like Rifts for whatever reason, but saying it's "imbalanced" shouldn't be one of them. It's a feature not a flaw. But I would ask, if balance is that important, how do we even explain the existence of Rifts?

Because the balance tends to happen at the table level.

You don't see parties where a Vagabond and a Cosmo-Knight are in the same party outside of parody. The GM lays down parameters like "no Glitterboys, Dragon Hatchlings, Godlings, and absolutely no Cosmo-Knights" -or- "Cosmo-Knights and Godlings are absolutely allowed, pick you OCC/RCC accordingly." I

The last game I was in had, corebook OCCs (no Glitterboy or Dragons) only as a limit. We ended up with a Ley-Line Walker, Mind Melter, Dogboy (tracking/combat specialist), Body-Fixer, and a Robot Pilot (using a Flying Titan; one of the weakest power armors in the game); all humans except the Dogboy.

I actually talked to Kevin one year at Origins over lunch and the subject of game balance came up. He agreed with all of the above. He's designing a world and lots of things in a world are just unbalanced. It's up to the GM to decide the balance of his own campaign by allowing and disallowing things.

So, even Rifts has its balance, it's just not in the authorial tier world-building, but the GM-tier campaign building.

My favorite Rifts character was a vagabond...it actually worked out because he was the only non-magic/mutant PC in the entire party so the only one who could talk to CS soldiers and not get blasted into oblivion. My favorite Stormbringer PC was a beggar with a club who turned out to be the best combatant in the party. Maybe I just like making "unbalanced" characters useful.

Quote from: tenbones on February 25, 2025, 10:56:42 AMRifts. It has zero "balance" in class construction, rules consistency*, or narrative balance of the setting.

Yet, it's been actively played, and is still going strong for decades. I'd suspect its more popular now than ever.

Now I'm sure there are those here that don't like Rifts for whatever reason, but saying it's "imbalanced" shouldn't be one of them. It's a feature not a flaw. ...

I disagree; Rifts is a prime example of objectively bad game design.

It sells a lot of Sizzle, but the Steak is severely undercooked.

Most everyone here familiar with the system is well aware of its issues

Quote from: tenbones on February 25, 2025, 10:56:42 AMBut I would ask, if balance is that important, how do we even explain the existence of Rifts?

100% Legit question.

Fist, Rifts benefits hugely by being one of the first games of its type. In RPG land first mover advantage is huge, and nostalgia sells

It has also been demonstrably proven through other game lines like Shadowrun, or 1st ed Vampire, that gamers are ridiculously tolerant of bad game design if they otherwise like the core concept of an RPG.

Once you realise that most Palladium RPGs are really just a series of cool setting books, a lot of their popularity makes sense.

Gamers like Rifts as a concept. And gaming nerds being what they are, always think that they can make it work...

I reject the whole 'Balance at the table' conceit, because if I pay for a rules-set I don't think it unreasonable that it actually does what it says on the tin.

I do not like paying for the privilege of doing the game designers work for them.

The hard truth is that the RPG hobby as a whole has been far too tolerant of crap game design.

We have too many examples of good game design now to justify making excuses.

Quote from: Jaeger on February 25, 2025, 02:58:05 PMI reject the whole 'Balance at the table' conceit, because if I pay for a rules-set I don't think it unreasonable that it actually does what it says on the tin.

I think you may have misunderstood my point about 'balance at the table level.'

It's not "GMs are expected to make the mechanics work to balance things."

Rather, its "this is a setting where everything from gods to vagabonds exist. The GM decides the range of options he wants at his table. If he wants to make a campaign of the gods warring with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Africa, you can do that. If he wants to do a campaign about underequipped merc infantry having to hold a town against bands of roving bandits and monsters, you can do that too."

Its like saying "You can start your D&D campaign with the PCs at whatever level makes sense for the campaign start point and its end point" only in this case its which character options are you choosing because Rifts has a relatively slow linear progression relative to D&D.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 25, 2025, 03:15:53 PMRather, its "this is a setting where everything from gods to vagabonds exist. The GM decides the range of options he wants at his table. If he wants to make a campaign of the gods warring with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Africa, you can do that. If he wants to do a campaign about underequipped merc infantry having to hold a town against bands of roving bandits and monsters, you can do that too."

You can do that with any RPG.

That's just GM's choosing to curate the game to make it work for them.

Still no excuse for objectively bad game design, which is what I am talking about.

After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that "Balance" is mostly WotC trying to raise a barrier to entry for indie designers by blowing the smokescreen around their game that they have exhaustively playtested it. They didn't even fully proofread D&D's 2024 PHB to ensure features work Rules As Written, much less playtested it exhaustively. It's...a lie. They want indie game designers to spend millennia trying to playtest exhaustively because the more time they spend playtesting, the less likely this competing game will ever make it to market.

I'm not saying there's no use for playtesting, but that playtesting is far more about checking core functionality than anything else. No one actually uses it to systematically hunt down system flaws because that's just too expensive.

I think there are some legitimate concerns with balance and there are concerns you should ignore. Balance can mean PC spotlight time, PC raw power, or the chances that the PCs will win a specific encounter. I don't think that it makes any sense to say PC spotlight time or raw power need to be equally distributed. The design decisions which make it so the GM can use a Challenge Rating to guarantee the players will win does so by removing almost all player skill input, which makes the game aspects of the RPG boring.

This is why RPGs tend to have terrible combat compared to wargames, and rarely have interesting gameplay compared to board games; the quest for balance has shrunk the player skill and system mastery aspect of the game to the point that players listlessly dribble their fingers through the gameplay rather than putting effort in.

So far from being a good thing, balanced design is actively a bad thing.

Some balance is fine and some imbalance is fine.  What is not fine, is schizophrenic imbalance or obsessive compulsive balance.

Another way to think about that, is the mechanics should do what you say they do.  If your balance is wizards start off weak but get stronger as they go (balance over time), then the game should work that way.  Some people won't like that choice, but they'll be able to see it clearly, because you outright tell them it works that way. 

It may not be everyone's choice, but it is a better design than:

- You said that wizards start weaker and get stronger, but they don't start all that weak or they don't get all that strong.

- You made everyone the same so that you didn't need to wrestle with the question at all.

Instead, the designer should pick their balance and imbalance carefully, whether that be to reflect the setting, spotlight time, or whatever. 

The main problem with "balance" is that the very concept is out of control, driven by OCD mechanics uber alles, setting be damned.  Stop listening to those people, and a moderate dose of targeted balance is a useful, if not primary concept.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 25, 2025, 11:21:30 AM

Quote from: tenbones on February 25, 2025, 10:56:42 AMRifts. It has zero "balance" in class construction, rules consistency*, or narrative balance of the setting.

Yet, it's been actively played, and is still going strong for decades. I'd suspect its more popular now than ever.

Now I'm sure there are those here that don't like Rifts for whatever reason, but saying it's "imbalanced" shouldn't be one of them. It's a feature not a flaw. But I would ask, if balance is that important, how do we even explain the existence of Rifts?

Because the balance tends to happen at the table level.

You don't see parties where a Vagabond and a Cosmo-Knight are in the same party outside of parody. The GM lays down parameters like "no Glitterboys, Dragon Hatchlings, Godlings, and absolutely no Cosmo-Knights" -or- "Cosmo-Knights and Godlings are absolutely allowed, pick you OCC/RCC accordingly." I

The last game I was in had, corebook OCCs (no Glitterboy or Dragons) only as a limit. We ended up with a Ley-Line Walker, Mind Melter, Dogboy (tracking/combat specialist), Body-Fixer, and a Robot Pilot (using a Flying Titan; one of the weakest power armors in the game); all humans except the Dogboy.

I actually talked to Kevin one year at Origins over lunch and the subject of game balance came up. He agreed with all of the above. He's designing a world and lots of things in a world are just unbalanced. It's up to the GM to decide the balance of his own campaign by allowing and disallowing things.

So, even Rifts has its balance, it's just not in the authorial tier world-building, but the GM-tier campaign building.

Yeah that's my point upthread. The Rifts is the example of why the whole "balance" in gaming doesn't *ever* happen in the rules. It's all done by the GM. But that's something that people who are "forever players" probably don't click with unless they really give it some thought.

People that chase game-balance in the rules, or worse, design around that idea, end up with games that feel more boardgamey *at best*. 4e is a good example of this. And there is nothing wrong with this in a skirmish game. But for RPGs? Its an inferior concept that produces an inferior product.

We should be talking about how one "balances" their games from the GM seat as a more relevant discussion, imo. Not everyone approaches things the same way. I know my Realms games feel nothing like what most other people's Realms games I've played in. But that's because as GM's we emphasize the things we find important. The more skill you have as a GM the more bandwidth you can focus on those details. The world in motion is larger, and extends much further than what players and through their PC's can guess.

When people rely on the written product as the primary arbiter of "balance" you're ceding your own agency as the GM to express the setting as *you* want it done for your players to run wild in. MOST written content for RPG's be it a singular adventure, or even a dedicated sandbox of material can't contain everything the PC's might do, or attempt to try. And if you value player agency, which one should, otherwise we're all talking about very different definitions of RPG's and why we play them, then we should get our hands dirty with our settings and make them our own. "Balance" will emerge from that. And slowly as the GM gets more experience, those experiences will get better for their players.

Of course... this is the surest path to becoming the Forever GM... you've been warned. heh.

I think there's an interest point of balance being in service to the setting, from Pundit's example of historical wargames.

Quote from: RPGPundit on February 25, 2025, 09:21:43 AM

Quote from: jhkim on February 23, 2025, 01:59:14 AMLater in that same issue, James Ward said this:

Quote from: James M. WardGame Balance, GAME balance, GAME BALANCE! I have heard this term loudly proclaimed by Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz, and even a time or two by the very excellent editor of this magazine, Tim Kask.

(That article is about game balance in dungeon design rather than character generation, but from Gygax's own words, he thought it was important in both.)

Most of the wargames I like are not actually balanced, because they reflect historical battles.

My impression of historical wargames is that they will try to set balanced victory conditions such that an overmatched side can technically "win" by achieving certain goals. I didn't play historical wargames much - but I did a fair amount of Star Fleet Battles which had some fictional-history scenarios like this.

Some RPGs encourage certain options by making them favorably unbalanced in order to reflect the setting. I think of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, say, which deliberately made the "Slayer" option stronger than other hero options. An RPG can also look at alternate ways of balancing. Like how in the Ars Magica setting, mages are simply more powerful than non-magical characters, so it balances by having players take turns who plays their mage rather than gimping mages.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 26, 2025, 11:06:10 AMInstead, the designer should pick their balance and imbalance carefully, whether that be to reflect the setting, spotlight time, or whatever. 

The main problem with "balance" is that the very concept is out of control, driven by OCD mechanics uber alles, setting be damned.  Stop listening to those people, and a moderate dose of targeted balance is a useful, if not primary concept.

You imply that it's better to start from the setting, which I often enjoy though it maybe isn't the one true way.

One of the peculiarities of D&D is that it started from the rules and built its settings around the rules, rather than the setting coming first. This led to oddities in balancing, like clerics not using edged weapons without thought of who their god is. Or magic users not being able to wear armor in original AD&D, which left unexplained what happened if someone tried to put a magic user into armor. In 3E, this was back-justified with armor proficiencies and spell failure chances.

Quote from: Jaeger on February 25, 2025, 04:18:06 PMYou can do that with any RPG.

That's just GM's choosing to curate the game to make it work for them.

Still no excuse for objectively bad game design, which is what I am talking about.

Yeah. I should add - there *is* bad game-design. The ability to overcome that is commensurate to the GM's skill. The funny thing is I've been *that guy* for decades, running systems like d20-based ones simply for no other reason than "tradition". There is a kind of two-way-street on that where familiarity of even BADLY designed systems: LOOKING AT YOU 3e will build tremendous inertia. And many of us languished there for far too long (granted I was trying to make it work.

At some point, much like those early OSR folks, you either go back to what worked for you, or like me, you realize you've spent so much time and energy trying to fix something you've created a Frankenstein that is effectively a fantasy-heartbreaker for your own group. And then you have that moment of clarity - you've been spending way too much time and energy trying to capture something that the system in question was never designed to do. This is what the OSR got right, to me. That less is more.

But I jumped ship from d20 altogether, because of my history with systems that did a LOT of things that d20 doesn't do well but does do "D&D style fantasy" just as well if not better. Talislanta's system is one of those. MSH showed me what a light system could do with power-scaling. The notion that D&D itself is just a bunch of tropes, nothing prevents anyone from using those tropes with a different system.

It's like driving a new car for the first time. Nope, its not a '71 Plymouth GTX OSR-edition. But it's going to take you to the same places you go regularly, just with different handling.

Today? If you're not into designing your own systems - there is really no excuse to find a system out there that *isn't* badly designed enough for you settle on beyond what is shoveled in front of you.

Gotta fight that D&D Brand inertia.

Quote from: jhkim on February 26, 2025, 04:30:32 PMI think there's an interest point of balance being in service to the setting, from Pundit's example of historical wargames.

Balance in service to the setting is *only* for the snapshot of time in which that setting is to be engaged with. Further the assumed scale of the game is to be addressed in the design - playing a War game ASSUMES the forces are balanced for the purposes of the conflict to be decided by strategy more than just mechanical stats.

Axis and Allies is a brilliant design for this reason. Case in point - you're not going to bother (unless you're just doing it for lols) stat out a division of German WWII Wermacht magically appear at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and play it out. Yay, the "Germans" win... but then what? I'm not trying to make a strawman here, I'm just illustrating that wargames and skirmish games play with this balance in design for an entirely different reason than RPG's.

RPG's are different in that they're designed for ad-hoc changes to the setting at the discretion of one source: the GM. In that the GM is sole-arbiter of changing the conditions of the setting as they see fit (or don't see, and fuck everything up).

Quote from: jhkim on February 26, 2025, 04:30:32 PMSome RPGs encourage certain options by making them favorably unbalanced in order to reflect the setting. I think of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, say, which deliberately made the "Slayer" option stronger than other hero options. An RPG can also look at alternate ways of balancing. Like how in the Ars Magica setting, mages are simply more powerful than non-magical characters, so it balances by having players take turns who plays their mage rather than gimping mages.

Never ran Buffy (or watched the show), but you're describing what people call "The Jedi Problem". Where one PC is a Jedi, and I can't count how many forum discussions have groused about this supposed "problem". When clearly as you point out there are whole games where by design there are going to be a single player that is "out of balance" with the others. I've *have* run Ars Magica a lot in the past. The funny thing is, my players always tossed out the "troupe style play" which is totally arbitrary and artificial, and instead they all just played mages and had a pool of minion npc's they bossed around or played as necessary.

The reality is - "balance" is a player concern. The "troupe" method exists because some players feel insecure when someone else is playing something else more "powerful" then themselves. It's an illusion. Characters with more power should have more responsibilities.

This is precisely how I run Supers campaigns that go on and on forever, where someone plays a Batman-like character on a team where someone else is playing a Thor-level Demon-trying-for-redemption. The Demon character has *WAAAAAY* more problems than the other PC that is dealing with super-spies, and stuff the Demon-character could put the kibosh on, like Superman would if Captain Cold was on the rampage.

The *GM* is the one that makes it work with their ruleset of choice. But if you relegate everything to just the rules, you get exactly what you described above: a wargame/skirmish-game that makes for a very sanitary RPG experience. Manicured for maximal blandness because individual PC's aren't armies or squads trying to do some singular strategic objective - unless you run your RPG's with that arm's distance. I don't. I want my players to sweat in the skin of their PC's.

Quote from: jhkim on February 26, 2025, 04:30:32 PMYou imply that it's better to start from the setting, which I often enjoy though it maybe isn't the one true way.

One of the peculiarities of D&D is that it started from the rules and built its settings around the rules, rather than the setting coming first. This led to oddities in balancing, like clerics not using edged weapons without thought of who their god is. Or magic users not being able to wear armor in original AD&D, which left unexplained what happened if someone tried to put a magic user into armor. In 3E, this was back-justified with armor proficiencies and spell failure chances.

And how did that work out? This gets back to how bad design can make it difficult for a GM to express a setting the way they need to because the rules get in the way. It can be done, but there is a differential ratio of GM skill and ruleset capacity to adapt. 3e is *pretty bad* at that.

"Balance," as the term is usually used is a crock, and an obsession with it leads to something like 4E.  Having characters with a variety of power levels in varying situations is a plus, it makes play more interesting.  There is one type of balance that I think in important, though, which I call "spotlight balance."  Everyone should have their moment to shine, and everyone should almost always have something to do, even if another character is the star at that moment.  The system can help a bit, but this is mainly on the DM.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 25, 2025, 03:15:53 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on February 25, 2025, 02:58:05 PMI reject the whole 'Balance at the table' conceit, because if I pay for a rules-set I don't think it unreasonable that it actually does what it says on the tin.

I think you may have misunderstood my point about 'balance at the table level.'

It's not "GMs are expected to make the mechanics work to balance things."

Rather, its "this is a setting where everything from gods to vagabonds exist. The GM decides the range of options he wants at his table. If he wants to make a campaign of the gods warring with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Africa, you can do that. If he wants to do a campaign about underequipped merc infantry having to hold a town against bands of roving bandits and monsters, you can do that too."

Its like saying "You can start your D&D campaign with the PCs at whatever level makes sense for the campaign start point and its end point" only in this case its which character options are you choosing because Rifts has a relatively slow linear progression relative to D&D.

Thank you. This is exactly it. This is precisely what I mean by curation.