Balance... whatever it is

[Trifletraxor]

Continuing the discussion from the weapon tables thread:

Balancing is not hard - to me mixed parties mach up well to natural foes. How often do five runelords travel around without a retinue? Typically, there is a Runelord accompanied by a few bodygaurds who are pretty competant, and then some inituiates and even lay members who tend to the animals, carry the spears, whatever. A very good match up to a mixed power level party.

The runelord and his competent bodyguards work well. But those playing lay members tending the animals etc., well, what do they do really?

SGL.

[Rurik]

Actually, the Runelord party was supposed to be a band of enemies (in your case sun worshippers, in my case troll scum ).

So the lower 'level' party members take on the weaker members of the enemy party.

If everyone in the characters party is 'Rune Level' a balanced foe is going to be largely all Rune Level as well so everyone has a 'fair' opponent. It all seems very contrived to me, and detracts from the realism.

Not every fight is fair, nor should it be. That is one reason I've liked the lethality of BRP. A big part of surving is knowing when to fight and when not to.

[Shaira]

Originally Posted by Rurik

Not every fight is fair, nor should it be. That is one reason I've liked the lethality of BRP. A big part of surving is knowing when to fight and when not to.

Absolutely agree. I find games annoying when they obsess about some ephemeral bogey called "game balance". BRP's occasional lethality, and the fact that seemingly innocuous encounters can sometimes go horribly wrong, are things which make the system feel more realistic to me. BRP players tend to treat the world around them with a healthy respect, not swan around like invulnerable battle machines trashing everything they see.

Also, characters can easily develop specialities, and non-Rune Levels can be extremely useful in other areas. You're very unlikely to find anyone who can pick a lock or smooth talk a diplomat amongst a band of Humakti rune lords, for example... The key is to not thing of scenarios / sessions as "this scenaro is designed for a party of 7-10th level characters" (etc), but as a bunch of individuals with various abilities trying to accomplish some goal.

[frogspawner]

'Balance' is not only unrealistic but also just plain wrong - because it undermines the reason for character progress (as per Atgxtg's point about training, from the Skills Base thread, which strikes me as applicable to any way characters improve...):

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

In mnay ways training in an RPG is just cheating yourself. Here is my theory:
1) The opposition's abilties are usually set to make the a challenge to the PCs. Inferior, yes, but still a challennge so they can provide an needed element of risk. Therefore if the PCs become twice as powerful the opposition must as well to maintain the element of risk.
2) The higher you skill the more hits you get and the greater the chance of a critical.
1+2= The more powerful the PCs become the more often the foes will hit and the more often the foes will critical. It true for the PCs too, but since the villains are the ones playing the game, who cares?

So by becoming more powerful the PCs cut into their margin for error and increase their chances of getting killed through a lucky hit.

[Atgxtg]

Not to jump the fence or anything, but the advancement coming around to bite you on the butt is one reason why I've shied away from balanced encounters and gone more with rating foes on an absolute scale rather than one relative to the PCs.

While some people on line have accused this this makes things boring, I''ve found that not to be the case with games that give all combat a certain degree of lethality, such as BRP. For instance, in BRP, even a 8 year old with a dagger has a slim chance of taking down a swordmaster. Yes, it slight, probably about 1 in 30,000 or so, but it is there. By contrast in a game where everything is relative, such as D&D, the same 8 year old poses no threat at all to a master swordsman. She would need to hit him multiple times, and avoid being hit herself. The net effect is that anyone holding a dagger presents a certain danger level in BRP.


So you can run an adventure where experienced PCs go up against lower grade, even inept foes and it can be challenging, and maintain the needed element of risk. While four goblins don't seriously threaten a 10th level fighter, four trollkin can seriously threaten a a character with swrod at 100%, or even take down a Rune Lord.

The real key to adventures isn't what down on paper, but what is is the heads of the players. If the GM can see some baddie as the worst thing in creation, the menance will be there.

[raymond_turney]

I've found that it is important to vary the threats characters face, and the things threatened. This does two things: it prevents characters from being optimized to face known threats; and it insures that characters with different skill sets will profit from working together. It also avoids boredom setting in, when the PC's have figured out there tactical doctrine and pretty do the same thing against similar enemies all the time.

For example, in one game I was having a lot of trouble with a very tough rune lord equivalent. Since he was a Yanafali, I kept things interesting for him by having a subplot be people attempting to administer his resources away {transferring troops to other commanders, getting his armor assigned to someone else, etc}. It was amazing how quickly he decided he needed an administrative specialist. {I was working for NASA at the time, and they had something called Zero-Based budgeting, which made an appearance in the game}.

Also, in a game like RQ where a tank is heavily dependent on magical spells, adding some Dispel capability to the enemy mix can make a big difference. Players who thought their characters were invincible often feel less certain when their Shield spells go down. Also, in RQ and BRP {snd Fire and Sword} a fair amount of a character's defense is "active". Overwhelming them with numbers, so that they cannot parry all of their foes, is often an effective tactic. Offbeat forms of combat, such as spirit combat, can also be a problem for the PC's. As you might imagine, when facing high level parties I often use all three techniques, plus a demon or other large monster

In short, by keeping the threat mix unpredictable and sometimes using non-lethal obstacles, it is possible to go a long toward balancing an inherently unbalanced game. On the other hand, by facing the PC's with pretty much the same type of opposition using the same tactics all the time, it is possible to go a long ways towards wrecking the balance of a fairly well balanced game. Game balance is much more a GM issue than a game designer issue, though the game designer should help the GM by making it easy to formulate a wide variety of challenges for the players.

[Atgxtg]

Methinks Ray's done this before.

[Trifletraxor]

Some good ideas there yeah. Especially the dispel type of spells I could use more often.

SGL.

[Atgxtg]

Originally Posted by Trifletraxor

Some good ideas there yeah. Especially the dispel type of spells I could use more often.

SGL.

One nasty battle tactic was to throw a countermagic on your foes. This was often good for messing up a protection or healing spell.

Casting invisibility on a downed foe had it merits too. But if you weren't careful it could stab you in the back (literally).


I pretty much singlehandedly unbalanced one DMs entire D&D campaign, by having a character charge through the enemy front ranks to get at the soft spell caster center. Thew DM never chanced his tactics and going through the ranks opened his whole line up and made it collapse. Basic blitzkrieg tactics and the DM couldn't handle it.


P.S>} I don't believe it. After messing up and spell checking half the English words, I managed to spell blitzkrieg right.

[Gnarsh]

Originally Posted by raymond_turney

For example, in one game I was having a lot of trouble with a very tough rune lord equivalent. Since he was a Yanafali, I kept things interesting for him by having a subplot be people attempting to administer his resources away {transferring troops to other commanders, getting his armor assigned to someone else, etc}. It was amazing how quickly he decided he needed an administrative specialist. {I was working for NASA at the time, and they had something called Zero-Based budgeting, which made an appearance in the game}.

I do a similar thing in my game. Not so much with the administrative headaches, but more about environmental problems (no. not like global warming!). The players were more or less "heroes" of the kingdom (or those rascally friends of the heroes who weren't perhaps so upstanding in their methods). But the adventures tended to follow larger plots that were outside the scope of the players to affect more then indirectly.

For example, I'm currently running a set off scenarios that will eventually result in a fairly large scale bad guy causing all sorts of problems. But for right now, the big problem is that the island nation off the coast has been having food shortages and this will spill over into the area the PCs are living in. So while they can kick butt on any random group of broos that might wander by, for all their power they are still at the whim of fate in the larger picture of things. This sort of thing may not seem that critical, but in terms of making a campaign believable, it's *huge*. Not all threats come in the form of a group of bad guys seeking to fight the party.

Also, in a game like RQ where a tank is heavily dependent on magical spells, adding some Dispel capability to the enemy mix can make a big difference. Players who thought their characters were invincible often feel less certain when their Shield spells go down. Also, in RQ and BRP {snd Fire and Sword} a fair amount of a character's defense is "active". Overwhelming them with numbers, so that they cannot parry all of their foes, is often an effective tactic. Offbeat forms of combat, such as spirit combat, can also be a problem for the PC's. As you might imagine, when facing high level parties I often use all three techniques, plus a demon or other large monster

I've done the same sort of thing as well. In my game, I've actually come up with some special rules (extensions on engaged and closing rules really) that allow for foes with a numerical advantage to turn that into a real combat advantage. So a horde of trollkin can theoretically swarm over a group of much tougher opponents and win. Also, I've found that mixed groups of bad guys work well. Not everyone's going to be exactly the same and that should apply to the bad guys as well. This allows for mixed power level PC groups to work. You can have one or two much tougher PCs in a group simply by adding additional foes that aren't much tougher. Sure, the powerful guys will wade through them, but as long as you're challenging the bulk of the group, this still works. Obviously, you can (and should!) also have the tougher NPCs face the tougher PCs and give everyone a challenge.

Also, it's not wrong for a GM to throw an encounter out there that the players are simply going to win. Let's face it, if you've got a party full of Rune level characters, exactly how many random encounters are going to challenge them? Sometimes, this can be some of the most comical and "fun" encounters and result in stories that players re-tell over and over though. We were once on an adventure with a "high power" group. Really high power. As in, we're going after some super old vampire-litch wanna-be deity guy holed up in his evil lair with his hordes of minions and whatnot to mess up his millennium. Along the way, the party's traveling through some hills. The ridiculously powerful (and hilariously "evil") elf shaman/gardener character spots a trip rope ahead on the trail. On a whim, he decides to just shoot the rope, gets a lucky hit and snaps it with a single shot from his bow. The party kinda shrugs and moves on. The next day, they see what looks like a well hidden pit trap. The earth priestess tosses out a large gnome and rumbles it. The party shrugs and moves on.

At the end of the adventure, the GM admitted that he'd originally had a group of bandits there who were going to attempt to harass/ambush the party. However, after seeing how easily we just blew through their well laid traps, they decided that messing with us was just not a bright thing to do and packed it in. IMO, that was *vastly* more fun, interesting, and "real" then if he'd just buffed up the power level of the bandits and had them attack.


It's important to treat NPCs as more then numbers on a sheet calculated to face and challenge the players. Sure, the adventure should challenge them (in multiple ways hopefully), but each individual NPCs presumably has a reason for doing what he's doing. Bandits aren't there to provide a fun fight for the PCs along the way. They presumably actually want to get some cash without dying. Broos may want to spread chaos and expand their cult(s) evil influence in an area, but each one will certainly prefer to do this by having their rival or competing tribe members die then themselves.

Balance is important, but it's not just about balancing individual encounters. It's also about making the game world feel like it's a real place, with real consequences and rewards and in which the NPCs at in ways that make sense. So sure, sometimes that means that a horde of baddies are going to descend upon the player character's heads. Other times, that's going to mean that enemies will slink away in the night to plot some other less suicidal method of obtaining their goals...