You might find this article vaguely relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20220516062841/https://sinisterdesign.net/the-battle-system-i-wish-rpgs-would-stop-using/

Quote from: Headless on June 27, 2022, 09:56:51 AM
Thanks.  Your whole post was helpful but this part right here really gets to what I was talking about.  I don't want to be picking their fights.  I don't want to be throwing any Xs at them I want them to choose their own fights.  Not for every encounter.  But for some of them.

I think you misunderstand my meaning.

Unless they're rolling them off a random table, the GM is always picking which fights are available to the PCs. They are deciding where and sometimes when (some monsters move about and so are not present at some times in the day) each potential fight is in relation to the PCs. And unless they're relying 100% on dice rolls on the Reaction Roll table with no adjustment for roleplay or interaction then they're deciding how reasonable the PC's efforts are to avoid a fight when they encounter a situation with the potential to break into one.

If you decide to place an unwinnable fight on the map with no clues to its existence to forewarn the PCs they might want to turn back... then you are choosing to place an undetectable TPK trap on the table. If the ability to judge difficulty is obscured then perhaps you can do this by accident. All "balance/difficulty mechanics" do is minimize the chance that this happens by accident. If you've done it, its because you wanted an undetectable TPK trap in the game.

And that's fine... maybe your players enjoy that style of play. But many times it feels like the main argument against having such a system in place is that it destroys the ability of GM's to pretend that their choice to put the TPK into the game was an accident instead of a deliberate choice. The lack of balancing mechanics gives cover to bad behavior masked as ignorance of the system.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 27, 2022, 12:50:51 PM
First, no one believes in "balance" - if they did, the monster would win 50% of the fights.

What "modern" players want is that the PCs rarely risk being defeated, except, MAYBE, for the final boss.

I hate the idea that every foe the PCs encounter is tailored to give them an exciting fight with no real danger.

I LIKE the idea that PCs get to PICK their fight. They can negotiate, escape, sneak around, attack by surprise, retreat, parlay, surrender, bribe, etc.

I agree. When people talk about balance it's usually in the context of designing combat encounters that provide a challenge but can be won at the current level of the PCs. I do prefer to run and play in games where accepting different outcomes (avoiding combat, fleeing, surrender, negotiation, etc) or tilting the scale (setting an ambush, potion, a ruse, etc.) are common. An evenly matched fight to the death should be very, very rare.

I'm thinking about what I want.  What I'm going for.

I want the solution to the problem to often not be on their character sheet. 

That's what I mean by balance.  You can balance a character sheet it's hard but they have done it.  You can't balance everything. 

The best balance for me is having everyone's stories take a turn on the stage. I don't care about the fights as fights.

Meeting a band of goblins in the road? Meh.
A band of goblins that is going to your player's village to murder his family? Now you've got stakes. Now you've got motivation to stomp those goblins into the mud.

And then you need everyone's part to be balanced in all of this.

The combat shit? Meh.
Murder Hobo'ing is fun, don't get me wrong... but it's not so much about the fighting as it is about participating in a fun and present world.

And if you're not going to do that, then at least engage your players' senses. Like, the good ol' gonzo dungeon where you're using the old school creativity to entice and excite rather than some finely tuned combat machine that you're unleashing on your players in some kind of adversarial role.
I'm really on the players' side as a cheerleader, not an adversary (even if the encounters are trying to kill them). Some of the more combat-oriented games just become so adversarial, it's like a painful slog to get through them.

Make it interesting and present and important to your players. That's the balance sauce, IMO.
Relying on combat to do that is kind of a mistake, I think.

This comes up over on BGG now and then. And more than a few of them worship it like a religion.

The big problem that they always miss over there is that balance is an illusion.

Balanced for What? For Who? For when?

A system balanced for a cookie cutter group of Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric, Thief may be a complete wipeout for a party of 4 magic users. Or a cakewalk for four fighters.

This is where some WOTC modules fell totally apart as they were 'balanced' for a cookie cutter group and there was no way to progress AT ALL if you were lacking one of these somehow. While other adventures are not so lockstep. But their idea of balance skews in some other way and again will collapse if the party or players do not play the way the module is balanced to.

If one side is strategizing and the other is not then that can skew balance straight to hell too. Or if one side has range and the other does not.

This is the age old situation that there is not such thing as balance once things actually get rolling. I had a situation where a group of 4 kobolds up on a ledge out of reach of most of the party was able to nearly massacre the party with what would otherwise have been a very easy encounter. Same campaign and some time later the Party as facing off against a dragon and started using the terrain of its own lair against it and won.

I used to worry about this, but experience has taught me the players will balance the game for you. It's probably a good idea to signpost the difficulty if your players are used to balanced encounters. This is fairly easy to arrange by letting the PCs witness the destruction of an NPC group or something similar. Then just let them have at it.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 27, 2022, 12:50:51 PM
I hate the idea that every foe the PCs encounter is tailored to give them an exciting fight with no real danger.

I do not understand how a fight can be exciting when it is carefully stacked such that the PCs are intended to win. I find combat like that to be a chore, and would rather roll once to ablate resource and move on than play it as the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Balance is for the players to find, no the GM to arrange. How tough of a mission do the players accept and what do they do to mitigate it instead of level locking out missions or adjusting them to always be safe. I do not believe that PCs are supposed to win or loose, as it is up to them to pick their fights and pursue their desired outcomes. A ramping challenge against a sentient adversary falls down as soon the adversary should identify the PCs as a threat an counter with an overmatched asset instead of sending in the next +1 mook. That would be a good time for the PCs to retreat and seek allies instead of yet another balanced PCs-are-supposed-win encounter.

The GM needs some idea of the difficulty of an encounter in order to properly convey whatever clues are present, should the players be on the ball enough to pay attention and look for the information.

I would suggest that the AD&D/RC/BEMCI system of telegraphing this information to the GM is superior to the WotC various challenge rating attempts, if for no other reason that the "Hit Dice + asterisk for special abilities" system has less false precision.  Both are about equally vague in practice, but the earlier versions reinforce that vagueness to the GM by their nature.

However, I think GM experience is the vital ingredient, and that part of the job can't really be done without it.  Because it is as much art as a procedure.

Balance can only be evaluated when you have a certain objective in mind. In a RPG, what objectives are there, really? All of the games that try to boil down characters into strictly mechanically-comparable units come across (IMO) as really sterile and inflexible.

RPG games are mostly about the social dynamic, which can never be captured by the game rules. You can try to balance various mechanical aspects in a limited scope, but what really matters at the end of the day is if the player feels engaged, like they're contributing to a game and not overshadowed by other players.

Balance, in terms of some sort of rating system for challenges, is something that absolutely 100% is a useful tool for GMs if for no other reason than this:

The more open your game, the greater your sandbox, the more freedom you give your players--you know, all that shit some GMs give as reasons why balance is somehow beneath them--the less practical it is to be prepared for everything. But if you can anticipate what players are more or less likely to do next, you can prioritize what you prepare, minimizing your prep time while maximizing preparedness. And the key to being able to anticipate is understanding how players make their decisions. And that can vary a lot, but easily one of the most powerful tools is to understand their risk/reward assessments.

If in your RPG 2 giants are roughly four-times the challenge of 10 goblins, the players sooner or later with experience that to one degree or another. That makes an objective rating system a useful proxy for the imperfect and subjective assessments of the players. If the giants are going to sap 80% of your resources whereas the goblins will only take up 20%, then facing the giants is going to have to do a LOT more in terms of moving the party closer to their goals to make that a viable path. And if the party is only at half strength, then perhaps facing the giants is out of the question regardless of how much reward.

Conversely, when the prospect for reward far exceeds the risk assessment, wise players should be suspicious. The greater the degree to which the reward exceeds the risk, the more obvious to more players it becomes that the situation is a clearly-baited trap.

Same thing even when it comes to assessing the doability of a challenge. I was putting together an adventure once where after doing some number crunching, I determined 1 giant was a dead even match for the entire party. That would have been an exciting fight. But I felt at the time that there had already been a lot of combat in the campaign and we needed to mix things up a bit. I made it 4 giants instead. After that, I realized if I had made it just 2 giants, the players might not have recognized until it was too late that was a fight they couldn't win. With 4 giants, it was more obvious they needed to think of a different solution. So the objective ratings are even useful in the face of player fallibility. You can use these measures to make the relative dangers more or less obvious to players.

So yeah. "Balance" is a good thing. That's the easy question. The hard question is how to do it. A creature that is very powerful in combat--much more powerful than the party--is a death sentence if it's movement rate is faster than the party's. It's far less threatening if it's very slow. The dreaded beholder, under some generic, plain vanilla set of "default" conditions is easily among the weakest monsters in the Monster Manual. It's movement rate is only 3". It's longest-range attack is Charm Person at a range of 12". Most of its attacks have a range of 6" or less. It can be deadly in a maze of a dungeon with a lot of twists and turns where it's hard to run at full speed and where you can't attack from a long distance. For this reason, I imagine a beholder will rarely stray from a very specific environment where it is powerful. There's no general frame of reference that will allow you to accurately rate the creature.

For this reason (and because it's my strength) I always do my own math and never rely on the built-in challenge rating system, if the RPG even has one.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on June 26, 2022, 06:36:21 PM

Quote from: Headless on June 26, 2022, 04:35:17 PMAvoid fair fights.

You are basically asking your party to be cold-blooded murderers. I've played games like this and they get very disturbing very fast.

Pausing to allow your enemy to draw his sword and prepare for the fight is the action of a hero. Stabbing them in their sleep is not.

This is a game, in part, based on stories about characters with dubious moral character, where the primary means of character advancement was gathering up huge amounts of loot.

Quote from: Headless on June 26, 2022, 04:35:17 PM
Any one have any thoughts or suggestions on unbalanced adventures?

My brother was GMing a new "campaign". We rolled up characters and started in "The Tavern", getting to know the characters and learning about the adventure to come.
Then, an adult Red Dragon ripped the roof off the tavern and breathed fire on everyone inside. Even making saves (I don't remember if anyone did) the damage was enough to kill everyone inside, including all the characters.
We had a good laugh, and he said he did it because we'd never done something like that.

While an absurd example, It does illustrate that there are some encounters that are simply Game Over. Most GMs won't put such an encounter in the adventure. At best, there would be some kind of telegraphing or warning so that the players have some kind of input before they get fried.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 27, 2022, 09:35:07 AM
Addendum on the deadly encounters thing; a maxim a very good GM once told me is that "for heroic fantasy to be fun then you need to allow for stupidity to lead to character death, but bad luck alone should not lead to character death."

If a PC dies because they choose to walk into a dragon lair at level 1 that's stupidity. If a PC dies because they stumbled into a dragon's lair at level 1 with no warning signs whatsoever it was even there that's not fun.

His correlary to this was "you can't count engaging with the game's core premise as stupidity on its own." Basically, if your game is about exploring dungeons then the act of entering a dungeon to explore it can't count as stupidity for the "can lead to death" evaluation. Not checking for traps? Sure... that's stupid. Not listening at doors? Sure... that's stupid. Getting hit with an earworm parasite that kills you for listening at the door? Stupid. Rocks fall. Everyone dies? Stupid.

It is a lot easier to apply this philosophy without the need to fudge dice rolls when you have good balance metrics.

I've boiled my approach to encounter design and difficulty to, if the players lose (fail to achieve an objective, characters get killed, imprisoned, whatever) they should be thinking "We could have done that better" and not "That was the GM being a dick" or "We didn't have a chance" Now, that's a goddamn fine line to walk, and you can't control what players think, but it's a goal to aim for.

Quote from: Headless on June 27, 2022, 04:55:10 PM
I'm thinking about what I want.  What I'm going for.

I want the solution to the problem to often not be on their character sheet. 

That's what I mean by balance.  You can balance a character sheet it's hard but they have done it.  You can't balance everything.

Then don't use a game which allows characters to rely on feats or special abilities - which means 99% of D&D type games.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on June 28, 2022, 05:14:34 AM

Quote from: Headless on June 26, 2022, 04:35:17 PM
Any one have any thoughts or suggestions on unbalanced adventures?

My brother was GMing a new "campaign". We rolled up characters and started in "The Tavern", getting to know the characters and learning about the adventure to come.
Then, an adult Red Dragon ripped the roof off the tavern and breathed fire on everyone inside. Even making saves (I don't remember if anyone did) the damage was enough to kill everyone inside, including all the characters.
We had a good laugh, and he said he did it because we'd never done something like that.

While an absurd example, It does illustrate that there are some encounters that are simply Game Over. Most GMs won't put such an encounter in the adventure. At best, there would be some kind of telegraphing or warning so that the players have some kind of input before they get fried.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 27, 2022, 09:35:07 AM
Addendum on the deadly encounters thing; a maxim a very good GM once told me is that "for heroic fantasy to be fun then you need to allow for stupidity to lead to character death, but bad luck alone should not lead to character death."

If a PC dies because they choose to walk into a dragon lair at level 1 that's stupidity. If a PC dies because they stumbled into a dragon's lair at level 1 with no warning signs whatsoever it was even there that's not fun.

His correlary to this was "you can't count engaging with the game's core premise as stupidity on its own." Basically, if your game is about exploring dungeons then the act of entering a dungeon to explore it can't count as stupidity for the "can lead to death" evaluation. Not checking for traps? Sure... that's stupid. Not listening at doors? Sure... that's stupid. Getting hit with an earworm parasite that kills you for listening at the door? Stupid. Rocks fall. Everyone dies? Stupid.

It is a lot easier to apply this philosophy without the need to fudge dice rolls when you have good balance metrics.

I've boiled my approach to encounter design and difficulty to, if the players lose (fail to achieve an objective, characters get killed, imprisoned, whatever) they should be thinking "We could have done that better" and not "That was the GM being a dick" or "We didn't have a chance" Now, that's a goddamn fine line to walk, and you can't control what players think, but it's a goal to aim for.

  I have considered going something like what your Brother did there in a campaign, but not just for the LOLs but also for the 2nd wave of player characters.    We use Savage Worlds almost exclusively now, so choosing the appropriate "level" to do something like that is tough.  around Seasoned seems right for tone, as the players will be invested in their characters, but not so attached they harbor resentment for the event.   The purpose of the event would be to create a real villain in a campaign, one that is a purposeful antagonist rather than one that is there to see what lootz it has in its lair.   A dragon attack like that and then having the children of the adventurers gather a decade or two later to seek out and slay the dragon creates an arc that has a personal connection to the players (as their other character got killed), and one where every single thing those former characters ever did becomes an overblown folk tale (where even slaying a small group of goblins on the road has been archived as some great event where the group managed to thwart an army of evil humanoid ravagers) as well as their brave battle to attempt to save as many innocents as possible in a hopeless battle against a dragon (or some equivalent). 

   It is a bit bait and switch ( I thought it used as a sort of story device in something like "Death proof" where we find out the group of characters we are watching are not in fact the protagonists, but are merely humanized victims we focus a good deal more on so that their deaths mean more than Rando #1, 2, 3, etc. ) and I certainly would not use it for any group of players, and I am hesitant to use it for mine just because it is dickish to make such a railroaded event occur. 

   All that aside, these issues of balance is why I favor GURPS and Savage Worlds for games.   The level 10 Fighter surrounded by zombies is literally at zero threat in D&D.  Same if a score of guardsmen have crossbows aimed at him.   This is not the case at all in SW and GURPS.   Even an easy steam roll has a tiny element of danger too it, and any "fair" and "even" fight has a great deal of danger in it if the player is just trading blows.  A mismatch is certain death without a bit of creativity and strategy.   This goes for the bad guys too, and playing them as if they are creatures that had lives before they ran across the PCs makes a big difference in how encounters go, orc #5 has a small cache of coin and wants to start making goat jerky in his home village.  Well Orc #5 just watched Orc #3 who is known as the best brawler and toughest fighting in this small warband get his shit pushed in by the raging barbarian among these sketchy looking cave burglars that have just broken into their camp and started killing and burning everything  Fighting to the death is not on his mind, and he will gladly surrender and talk his remaining orc buddies into a parley with a group of characters where it is looking like even a win against them will result in big losses.   People do not care to be in fights where they win and half their friends die.   Why would most intelligent creatures (I try to make almost all undead and demons an exception to this, as their focus on complete destruction of enemies sets them apart as extremely dangerous and "evil" enemies) do it if most people would not do it?  Thinking a bit more creates scenarios where a bluff and quick show of force...like the muscular barbarian intimidating a good number of enemies and dropping two in the first moments of a fight....allows for another character to give the remaining enemies a chance to consider talking it out with a bit more motivation.   Things like that can make lots of encounters go differently.  Remember, MOST even intelligent adversaries for your players are in the dark as to what the characters are capable of, and certain demonstrations of force (a strong melee warrior knocking down 2-3 a shot, a good archer hitting a foe through the opening in his/her helmet, a sorcerer blasting a group of foes, etc early would make most intelligent opposition do some quick math on just how much even victory will cost.  I mean even the Nazis did not fight or kill to the last man.