Balance, when and why
Hi,
The issue of "balance" depends mostly on who your players are and why they play the game. Also, what the characters do.
We are all agreed that it is important that the players have fun. Some players are very competitive and want to be heroes all the time. If a player derives most of his enjoyment from being the center of the game in combat, and having the best optimized character, it is very important that his character be "balanced" relative to the others. It is particularly important if you have two or more competitive players. Other players, oddly enough, actually like weak characters. I felt it was more interesting to try to figure out how to accomplish something with Lyra {a rather new agey weak Nathan} than to do a better job of optimizing my character than one of our game's three wargamers. One of the wargamers is just a much better wargamer than I am, and if my character were theoretically the equal of his in fighting power, he would have twice the impact on the fights that I do.
Which is to say that "balance" is a tool for insuring that players enjoy the game. Some groups have 2-4 competitive players who spend a fair amount of time discussing the comparative effectiveness of their characters as killing machines. For these groups, balance is very important. Other groups don't have any wargamers who like power gaming, and for these groups, balance is less important. In these groups, the artificiality of starting high level characters may outweigh the advantages of making sure that the characters are of relatively even combat power.
Likewise, the issue of balancing encounters to PC's is an issue of player expectation. If the players know that some encounters will simply outclass their characters, and that they are expected to identify these encounters and run away, balance is less of an issue. Players know their characters will sometimes be outclassed, and that unassing the area is always an option. If the players think that all encounters are expected to be tuned for maximum dramatic impact, they may choose to attack an entire party of monsters which are individually as tough as the entire PC group. They will then feel betrayed when, with average die rolls, the monsters flatten them.
Oddly, wargamers are more relaxed about being expected to identify whether or not they are tough enough to beat an enemy than extreme role players {actors} are. Actors often expect the encounters to be dramatically scripted, and feel that there is no point having encounters that do not fit the script.
From a design perspective, a system should provide the tools so that a GM who needs to balance his games can; without imposing balance on GM's and groups who are not the kind of wargamers/powergamers for which this is most important. This is why game designers need to be aware of the techniques for balancing a game; and make it possible to use them; without worrying about building "balance" into the system itself.
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