User:Spazalicious Chaos/My Beliefs on Balance- A Rant

If you are looking for anything other than personal beliefs/observations, stop reading now. I promise you be disappointed.

A lot of gamers make references to balance in games, which means anywhere from "all possible characters are equal in power" to "the average encounter has a 50% chance of failure/success", to list but a few. While I agree with this premise in regards to video games and board games, I believe that this is a very misplaced concept in all table-top RPGs.

Balance =/= Fun
The reason tabletop role playing is fun is because it is a shared social experience between freely thinking minds. Social games rule, which is why the top selling games of the 00s were all multiplayer games. However, it is well known that as the number of people increases, the number of things they can agree on approach zero. Fun is not exempt from this concept. To test this, have your gaming group, without any communication between the members what so ever, write down A) their definition of fun, B) why role-playing games are fun, and C) what makes a bad game. I can almost garuntee that the closest sychrony you will find is two, maybe three people in your group will have similar definitions for C. The definitions will be as unique as the individuals themselves. This also means that certain aspects of the game will be vital and others will be unimportant to individuals, but they will not agree on which is which. For the curious, here are my definitions:
 * A- if you are completely immersed in something, absolutely lost in the moment, every fiber of your being strives towards the same project, and when it is over you want to do it again, you just had fun.
 * B- roleplaying games are good when and only when choices are not limited by mechanics/programing and allow for options beyond what the designers intended. Thus, the most fun RPGs are not written by game designers, but are the result of extensive homebrew.
 * C- if they break Spaz's Law of Immersion- if a simulation can not allow for the performance of a action the user can perform, it is impossible to see the simulation as believible.

As you can see, I prefer homebrew campaigns to straight core campaigns (which is why I believe the RPGA and the Camarilla suck) and I refuse to be in a box. This can, and has, caused major clashes with other players, such as:
 * The only time I ever wanted to punch a baby. The baby in question was an 8-year-old who had issue with being out voted on the matter of "Do we want to fight a plant God and incur the wrath of it's pet barbarians?" Despite it being a 11 to 1 vote for "hell no", the kid cried until his father, also a player, demanded that we go there anyway or he will kill all of our characters.
 * The time I reduced a player to crying because his character died at the hands of a troll ambush... at third level. He was the fighter jock who didn't run, while the rest ran and lived.
 * The campaign I left out of disgust when I found out (through research) that not only did not a single thing of what I wanted my character do was blantantly ignored, down to rewriting my character backstory to fit the campaign, but also it did not matter what we did unless we did something that was impossible to ignore/incorporate into the railroad of the campaign.

Choices, and What They Say About You
There are 101 "What Class/Race Are You?" quizes out there, but I'm finding time and time again that certain types of players tend to choose particular combinations of classes. I have noticed that there is a major theme in these four archtypes of player that is vaguely reminiscent of the | the four humors, and I also note a tendancy for groups to include at least one of each type of player. For fun, why add the four humors into this? Each entry will be indentified by it's preferred classes and the associated humor.

Heavy Casters/Complete Series Classes (Black Bile/Melancholic)
These guys are expert dumpster divers and rules mechanics, often putting together very powerful and mildly specialized characters that are lethal in one aspect and above average in all others. Game balance is a critical issue for these people, mostly because one homebrewed rule can quickly invalidate their characters power. Thus, it is often these guys who memorize large sections of rules and can qoute passages from various rulebooks. They tend also to be expert game mechanics, able to calculate when and where any rule can break down. They use rules as something of an anchor, a point of stability that must be structured and sound, and are often incapable of having fun with a free form campaign or tend to debate about and define the boundries on "what if?" scenarios. For these people, rules define a game and decide whether the game is good or bad.

Rogues/Barbarians/Specialists of All Kinds (Yellow Bile/Choleric)
People who play specialists on a regular basis (<-ammendment: In a single sitting anyone can be confused for a specialist upon choosing a specialized class, though this passage refers to those who choose a particualar kind of specialty over and over with little variation.) They do not bother with details outside their domain, and tend to get anxious and/or bored when the game falls outside their preferred zone. However, the sheer charisma of these people means that the games tend to get focused on what they want it to focus on. Natural leaders, even if they don't recognize it, these guys do not care about rules until they block his favorite part of the game. Woe to those who try to do so, as these players can and will poison the game until events turn back to where they want them to be. While they refuse to admit it, these guys are the game trashers and campaign wreckers, not because of some hatred of the game or emotional issues, but because they are only interested in one part of the game. Thus, these people tend to either gravitate to groups where their prferred circumstances are the mainstay, or else work their asses off to try to force a group into their favorite situations again and again.

Fighters/Rangers/Monks/Sorcerers/Newbs (Blood/Sanguine)
Almost every player started here. First time players often choose these classes because they are easy to master or are kinda like their favorite fictional characters. This is also where a lot of LotR clones appear. However, not all of us player "mature" into the other types, staying at this level of play, though this level of play is very healthy in many ways. These guys don't care about rules because they haven't learned them all yet. What they care about is if something interesting is going on and if they are having fun. As soon as one of those factors is gone, they doze, become bored, and eventually leave after about a month or so. If both of those factors are gone, they flake immediately and without hesitation. These players are very pure in that this is just a game for them, no different than that Scrabble board that is molding in their grandma's attic. They are not going to dedicate any time away from the table reading up on rules or working on their characters/adventure notes. It hasn't become a hobby, and they will treat it like it's a game regardless of how the other players feel. It's fun until it isn't anymore.

Unique Concept (Phlegm/Phlegmatic)
The classes these players choose are legion, and rarely if ever do they pick the same class twice. But these players have extensive backstory and notes on their characters, defining them in great, sometimes unnecessary detail. Their character have well-defined goals and personalities, almost completely separate from the players. For these players, all that matters is if they feel in the moment and if their character idea is validated. They are often a bit fuzzy on the rules and try to free-form even when doing so is unwelcome. They tend to ally with or become dumpster divers, if only because DDs are often the ones that present rules and options that allow these players to further define their concept. They often laugh out loud when their characters are labeled "unplayable" and are renowned for doing things well outside the rules. They often forget to roll dice when describing their actions, partly because of the great detail in the description, partly because dice seem to get in their way, or so they claim. Out of all the other types of players, these are the most likely to leave a group when things do not go their way. They are also quickly nominated for GM or subsitute GM, due to their great affinity for detail.

As you can see, balance is only a factor for one, arguably 1.5, of the player archtypes above. That says a lot about how important balance is: about fifteen items under "check for typos" in the "is this game playable" list.

Perfect Balance is Impossible
Anyone who has played Baldurs Gate, Champions of Norrath, even World of Warcraft, can tell you the classes are not balanced. In WoW Paladins and Death Knights rule the world. CoN Rangers can kill anything once they hit 5th level, including ememies not on the screen. BG, they have an arcane archer that everyone wants to play, making multiplayer games huge envy fests. Every strategy guide in existance will give advice for a "power build", ignoring all other builds. Off the top of my head the only two games that are remotely balanced are D&D 4.0 and FFXII, the former because that is the only thing going for it AND the reason it is so boring, and the latter because every character starts at a ground zero where any underpowering is your own damn fault. Even video games, where every single thing that you can do and everything you face is decided purely at the whims of the guy who designed that game, have yet to achieve anything close to balance. So what makes people assume it's possible?

My guess is that balance is supposed to be some kind of game nirvanna, where everyone is happy and having fun all the time and nothing bad ever happens because you have achieved the perfect form of gaming. However, there are two problems with this. First, we have to remember the Buddha achieved Enlightenment by starving for weeks under a tree while demons walked by and tortured him. I don't know about you, but for me perfection of a game isn't worth giving up food and being harrassed by extraplanar beings. Second, we have to remember that the grand majority of us are pretty happy already without the perfect game. I love my horrible D&D/PF/T20/BESM hybrid worlds. I love trouncing everything in Norrath with bow and arrow. I love being scared shitless pretending to be a completely mortal vampire hunter trapped in necromancers castle. The games we have now are already fun, otherwise we wouldn't be playing them. I can live without gamers nirvanna, and I'm guess the rest of you can as well. Thank you.