Game Balance: Threat or Menace?

First in a series.

Angry before it was cool.

Welcome to my Threat or Menace series where I talk about issues that are controversial in gaming. In case  you’re wondering, “Threat or Menace?” is taken from the desk of J. Jonah Jameson, who frequently writes after Spiderman would do something to save all of New York from certain destruction:

SPIDERMAN: THREAT OR MENACE?

That's my source and inspiration for this series of editorials. This is my series where I’ll get as close to being political as ever in 20OnTheDie. It’s also where I won’t shy away from a fight. As always, I appreciate comments, so let’s get a discussion started.

When I started to think about an opinion column for my blog, a lot of ideas came to mind, all of which you’ll see as time goes by. For my first column, I’m going to talk about something that’s been in the news as it were in nerd circles. Game balance.

It all started when I read this article by John Wick. Go ahead and take a look at it if you have some time. Now I know what you’re thinking, and this this time you’re wrong. Best not to upset John, since he looks like quite the tough guy.

Disagree with me about RPGs, will you?

But it’s not him that I’m talking about, but rather the game designer. John Wick is a game designer who has been involved with a lot of games. The ones you might be most familiar with are Seventh Sea and Legend of the Five Rings.

Game Balance: the Pitch

John has an attitude, and if you read his article: Chess is not a Roleplaying Game, you’ll see that come through right away.

Well this is the Internet, and everyone has an attitude here, so what better topic to start with than something I can have a good old fashioned rant about.

John’s point about game balance is ultimately this:

“... if the most important part of your game is balancing the damage, rate-of-fire, range modifiers, damage dice, ablative armor, dodge modifiers and speed factors, you aren’t playing a roleplaying game. You’re playing a board game.

And you need to stop it. Because all that crap is getting in the way of telling a good story.”

Well Allow me to Retort

My immediate reaction to that was pretty simple: it depends on what the story you’re telling is about.

I read and enjoy the author Larry Correia, and his Monster Hunter International books are all about issues like that. If you’re telling a story in that world, you bet things like weapon calibre, rate-of-fire, armor penetration capabilities and so forth are vital to getting the story right. These books are a lot of fun, and if you haven't checked them out, I recommend them.

Jim Butcher is another author I enjoy a lot, and his Dresden Files novels are set in a similar world to Larry’s (they’re both Urban Fantasy) but for Harry, guns are just props for the kind of stories he’s trying to tell, that are about choices and consequences. If you're one of the three nerds in North America who hasn't read them, you should seriously consider doing so.

Both good authors, both telling stories that--on the surface--are similar, but each one places a completely different emphasis on weapons and gear.

It’s no coincidence that I chose those two authors, since both of them play role-playing games themselves, and both of their book worlds have role-playing games out that let you adventure and tell stories in their worlds.

The Dresden Files role-playing game uses the Fate system for it’s engine, while Monster Hunter International uses the Hero system. It would be hard to find two game systems that are farther apart in rules or design goals.

Things get interesting when you ask if you could, for instance, play a game based on the Dresden Files with the Monster Hunter International rules set. Would it work? Of course it would, just as the reverse would. Each game would be different, and would feel different, but you could use either one to tell the same kind of stories. Would they be as good at telling the other’s stories? Most likely they would not.

Now according to John's quote up there, one of these games would be a role-playing game, and the other wouldn't.

Definitions and Stuff

Here’s the thing: John is making a fundamental mistake here, and I can’t fault him since a lot of people make the same one: he’s taking the term role-playing game and defining it as one specific thing, what I’d call a story-game. Here’s his actual definition for a role-playing game:

Roleplaying game: a game in which the players are rewarded for making choices that are consistent with the character’s motivations or further the plot of the story.

That’s a perfectly workable definition, but the problem is he then ignores the “game” part of his definition. The term he really meant to use was “pastime,” since that’s the term you use for spending an afternoon playing cops and robbers and arguing about who shot who. The point is: stories themselves don’t have rules. Games do.

A lot of people forget about the “game” part of role-playing games, but it’s an equally important part of the term, but it also tends to rear its head at the worst times, like when you’re declaring the game that 95% of the world immediately thinks of as a role-playing game isn't one. But I’m going to come back to that in a bit.

My Definition

Time for my definition of a role-playing game. Role-playing games are made up of two parts: the role-playing and the game. Each part is distinct, but they have to both be present in order to have an RPG. I purposely used the term “RPG” since it combines the two terms into a single acronym, and we gamers love them.

While you can have role-playing without things being a game, you certainly also can have a game without it being role-playing (John’s example of Chess is a good one) but you can’t have an RPG without both.

Let’s break down the terms and make them usable:

Role-playing is the part of RPGing that John is thinking about: it’s pretending to be an elf and getting together with your friends to tell stories about characters and the interesting lives they lead. Mountain Dew is optional, but common.

You may have done this when you were young while sitting around a campfire. I know that my father used to tell me stories with me as a character in them, and allow me to make decisions about what happened. It was role-playing. It was also surprising how many problems "getting your chores done," or "eating your vegetables" would solve.

The game aspect is where things get interesting. Here’s the definition of game I found with a quick Internet search (using Bing! 20OnTheDie’s official search engine, remember?) 

A game is a form of play or sport played according to rules, and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

That’s interesting: you have rules, that define how things are “decided,” and we have, for our purposes: skill, strength, or luck to determine the outcome.

RPGs certainly use skill and luck a lot, and a game like Dread gets into the strength category (well, agility to be more precise). That certainly sounds RPG-ish.

Okay, then what’s the outcome part? In a traditional game, you have a winner and a loser, but that doesn't really directly correlate with most RPGs (although some, such as Burning Empires will have a winner and a loser).

I would argue that the “outcome that gets decided” is exactly what John is conflating as everything in role-playing games: our story, and, most importantly, the parts of it we think are important.

When we come together to play a role-playing game, we’re telling stories, but we use the game part of it to spell out what kind of stories we’ll tell, how we’ll tell them, and what the important parts of the story are going to be.

This definition lets us play a huge variety of different games and play styles under the “big tent” of role-playing games. It tells us that we can play a game where balance based on equipment load is vitally important to the story, or ignore it entirely in favor of character bad-assitude and still be RPGing.

John uses a great example from the movies, when he picks out the scene where Riddick kills a thug with a tea-cup from the Chronicles of Riddick. It's right here if you care to watch it.

He then goes on to ask:

The question is: what’s the speed factor or damage dice or, really any statistic for a tea-cup? He’s using this to question the need for rules balancing different weapon types at all.

The thing is, there are plenty of games that could handle that action in their own way, using very different rules. In John's definition, some are RPGs, while a lot of the others are not. And yet, all of those games would claim to be RPGs.

A game like Fate doesn't care one whit about weapons: Riddick could have used any weapon (or none) and gotten that effect. But (and here’s the important part): the use of the Fate rules (which are strongly balanced in their own way) was predicated on the kind of stories we wanted to tell in the first place. Weapons aren't what’s important in Riddick’s story because he’s just that much of a badass.

Other games, like Feng Shui (remember, the game we just talked about?), would have handled the situation much the same way: it’s the hero that matters, not the tools.

A game like Shadowrun could also easily have handled that scene, and it's a game full of charts and tables about gear.

For a system like Dungeons and Dragons (the game that Vin Diesel himself was playing on the set when Chronicles was being filmed), the fact that Riddick was very high level and the thugs were all 0-level nobodies would have allowed him to defeat them even with such a basic improvised weapon.

There are countless different game systems that all could have accounted for this scene while having very different rules sets.

This scene in Chronicles wasn't about gear and weapons, it was about showing how Riddick was the baddest man on the whole planet. Pure and simple. And that’s what was necessary to show in the rules at the time.

Another Scene, Another Film

Now let’s take another scene from a different film, say from Saving Private Ryan. The long combat scene from the end of that film is very gritty and realistic. What would your thought have been if Tom Hanks flashed a tea-cup and took out the tank at the very end? You would have hated it. In fact, as Hanks pulls his pistol in a seemingly futile gesture, we see that to the last, he’s defiant: he can’t possibly stop the tank, but he’s not giving up either. He fights to the last. Here is is:

If Captain Miller could have used a cup or his pistol to really stop the tank it would have seemed jarring and entirely messed with our sensibilities and taken us out of the time and place of the film. I have to admit when I saw the film for the first time my reaction to the tank being destroyed was “what the heck just happened here?”

I use Saving Private Ryan as my example because while it’s so different than Chronicles, it also features Vin Diesel in it. Think for a moment about what happens to him there and the balance of it all. Vin Diesel effectively serves as a punchline here: “and that is why you obey orders.”

A role-playing game set in the world of Saving Private Ryan would be very different than that of Chronicles: it would tell completely different types of stories, and as a result, different things would be important.

Would this game treat things like weapon types, injury modifiers and weapons versus armor differently to balance things than a Chronicles game? It sure would.

The Axes of RPGing

So what’s the takeaway? Different types of stories can place different needs for game balance and rules on the table, and thus make different kinds of rules more or less important.

That’s the trick of it: a role-playing game isn't simply one simple thing that can be defined by an all-encompassing set of rules. Different stories require different tools to tell them effectively.

That’s why I describe role-playing games as having two axes: a role-playing importance axis and a rules and balance axis. Different games place different importance on different play styles and want to tell different kinds of stories, and so fit in differently.

A game like Fate is high on the role-playing axis, since it’s all about telling personal stories, and somewhat light on the mechanical balance axis, since it does care about this (through the Fate Point economy) but doesn't care about tracking individual clips of ammo.

A game like Shadowrun tends toward the high end on the rules and balance axis, and somewhat lighter on the storytelling axis.

Of course when I say this, I've doubtless stirred up arguments already, so realize I’m speaking generally: any given game can move along the sliding access with little effort based on the work that the GM and players put into it and what they think is important. Here’s my awesome graph describing the effects:

Now before you get upset, realize these are some pretty broad generalizations and aren't meant to slight anyone’s play style.

The Bullseye

The thing I want you to especially note is that I placed Dungeons and Dragons right in the middle: dead center for role-playing and dead center for rules and balance. I did that because D&D is the chameleon of role-playing games: it can look like whatever you want to do with it.

I've played in games of D&D that were basically free form improv acting, without a single die being cast. I've also played in D&D campaigns where everything was decided by a strict interpretation of the rules, and everything in-between.

And that’s where I find I have to fundamentally disagree with John: he directly argues that Dungeons and Dragons is not, in fact, a role-playing game. It’s here:

The first four editions of D&D are not roleplaying games. You can successfully play them without roleplaying.Call of Cthulhu, on the other hand, is a game you cannot successfully play without roleplaying. If you try it, you get… well, you actually violate the basic tenant of the game: to make yourself scared through your character’s choices.

This is wrong on so many levels, not the least of which is that it’s perfectly possible to play Call of Cthulhu without role-playing: you simply investigate the mystery, and when you find the bad guy, you bring in the shot guns and dynamite and boom… end of problem.

But that’s a side point. Time for OnTheDie’s First Rule of Arguing and Definitions:

Rule 1 of Arguments and Definitions

If your definition of a thing is such that the most widely accepted example of that thing does not qualify, the problem is with your definition, not the thing or the example.

So...

Dungeons and Dragons, for all intents and purposes, invented the role-playing game. For 95% of the non-gaming world, it’s exactly what they think of, and the only thing they think of when you mention role-playing games. Moreso, it's the only thing they think of.

It’s not very trendy to think that way, as almost every game since D&D first came out has been a response to what it did wrong, but it is what it is. Yes, story-games are role-playing games, but then so are game like Rolemaster or GURPS. And so is Dungeon’s and Dragons.

We’re all pretending to be elves, just in different ways.

Not Role-playing Makes it not an RPG

I also want to take a moment to comment on John’s “if you can play it as not an RPG, it’s not an RPG.” I can’t disagree with this more, since if we apply that maxim, there are no role-playing games. All you have to do in order to not role-play is think of your character as a “toon.” In this style of play your character is just a paper copy of yourself who you use to interact with the game side of role-playing games. You don’t role-play as such, but treat every situation as a challenge to overcome.

And yes, that’s an actual thing that spawned from online gaming, but you better believe it you can apply the same lack of characterization to any role-playing game. I’ve seen it a lot, usually by players who are more interested in the tactical, problem solving or puzzle aspects of the game. You know, those balancing things that John doesn't think contribute to role-playing.

Some Conclusions

So I've certainly taken a long time to get to my point, which if we circle back to the beginning was: Game Balance: threat or menace?

The answer is both. Neither. It all depends on the game you’re playing, which in turn tells you the kind of stories you want to tell. J. Jonah Jameson wouldn't be happy with that, but from what I've heard the Daily Bugle is closing down, so he’ll be out of work anyway.

What I Believe

The kind of game balance that I believe in is basically this: the game you play tells you the kind of stories you want to tell, and it also tells you what kind of characters you can play to be effective and tell great stories.

Game balance steps in and serves to make sure that if the game tells you that a certain kind of character can be effective and fun to play, it actually will be, and the that spotlight won’t constantly be stolen by the cleric or druid … I mean by the “more effective character choices.”

Games enforce balance in many different ways: from the Fate Point economy in Fate, to the low-level wizards are chumps, high-level gods rules in Dungeons and Dragons, to the balanced At-Will, Encounter, Daily or Utility powers of Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

How well these different games actually succeed with that attempt is the source of, to be honest, many other articles.

But in the mean-time, don’t take the effort to cross out the rules that try to balance the game you’re playing, instead think about the kind of stories you want to tell (and include your players here) and then pick a rules set that does what you’re looking for.

Of course that’s just my opinion and I could be wrong, let’s go have pie…

Until next time, Make Mine 20!