The concept of Balance within a roleplaying game

Game-balance is something often mentioned in roleplaying games. The idea comes from the world of boardgames/ strategy games (and later computer games), and the purpose is to make sure that units of different kinds are balanced against each other.

In many roleplaying games there is also a discussion that different types of characters should be equally powerful. A lot of time is spent on comparing feats/ abilities/ attacks etc to make sure that no character accidentally becomes more powerful than another.

There are two aspects of "balance" in a roleplaying game I feel often are neglected, and perhaps more important than power in a combat.

First of all is the ability to influence the story and the scene. Even though I might not be a combat monster, all players and characters should have a fairly equal input and ability to push the story or scene in a specific direction.

Second, all characteers should have an equal time in the spotlight. I've been in situations where one character has 1 simple attack / round whereas other characters have multiple attacks and/ or familiars and summoned creatures. This means that the player with the single attack can resolve his round in 10-15 seconds whereas players with a number of exotic attacks (with creatures etc) can take up to 3-5 minutes to solve his round.

For me, these two aspects, influence and time, are more important balancing factors than actual combat balance.

About what to play..

Usually when I'm set out to write a module or adventure for a roleplaying game I usually start with the question "What game do I want to play?" and then I go from there, trying to write an adventure for a particular game.

I am more and more starting to think that that's a slightly flawed concept. (At least partially. For a long-running campaign, you are usually bound by what game is played in the campaign. )

So, what's the alternative? Perhaps, the question shouldn't be what game to play, but rather what I want to simulate/ "experience". From there, I can pick an appropriate game rather than the other way around.

Of course, there are situations where you want to pick a specific game (it has a new concept or interesting rules to try out), but overall at least my tendency is to think game first and "situation/story" later. I will try to change this, and first and foremost think about imagery, stories and scenes.

Is Superman just strong?

Some time ago I read a thread on rpg.net (now, there's a surprise) about Dawn of Legends (DoL), a new Super Hero addition to Savage Worlds. Someone in the thread asked if DoL could support higher level characters, like Superman or the Flash.

The reply was that it definately was possible. However, the solution left me a bit less than enthusiastic. Basically, it was a multi-step-process. First you had to buy high levels of the Strength attribute. This in itself wasn't enough, but after that you had to buy Edges (I may be wrong on the terminology here) to increase damage, increase lifting capacity, make his punches armour penetrating etc.

This is not the first time I've encountered this line of thinking. A few years ago, I was a in a forum thread talking about Gurps Supers. The question was basically the same: How do you simulate a super-strong characters punches. The semi-official word was that you might as well buy it as a separate attack with a range of Touch. So, just getting a decent amount of strength wasn't enough, I also had to buy other things around the character to properly be able to reflect what I want him to do.

I find both these examples to be flawed. This is not from a simulationist point of view (which it might be if you asked me a few years ago), but from a usability point of view.

There are many usability guidlines that state that you should follow the users internal/ mental modell or expectations on how things work. It is natural, intuitive that if I buy a high level of strength (for intance) certain things follow with that. I shouldn't need to add a lot of details / extra feats on top of that, it should be included from start.

Normally I have the same opinion about to many feats in DnD, for instance. In order to build a decent fighter, I need to know that there are a multitude of different Feats that is more or less necessary for building the fighter.

Feats or Edges or whatever should be used to add specialties or tweaks to a character, but when they are more or less mandatory for a fairly straight up build, I think it's a sign of at least a partly flawed game design in the first place.

It's that time of the year again - Info is leaking out about Geist from White Wolf

Since the launch of the new World of Darkness, there has been a new line introduced every summer, and this year is no exception. It has been known for quite some time that the name is Geist, and that it seems to deal with ghosts in one way or the other.

However, it seems like more info is starting to leak, esp. from demo-sessions at cons etc, and this thread on rpg.net gives a few minor details for those interested.

[Geist] Minor spoilers about quickstart

I will post more info as I find it

Interesting resource for planning adventures

Adventure Designer

While surfing the web the other day, I found a page (see link above) with a nifty little pdf-document to be used when planning an adventure. While it's nothing complex or sophisticated, it's nice in it's simplicity. There are sheets for entering a summary for characters, rumours, map locations etc. There is also a short adventure-planning-checklist at the end of the pdf.