Avoid the balance

twitter: pixelartjourney

I've realized that I am really averse to game balance. I can understand the importance of it in some kind of games (computer or strategy games, for example, need all their factions to be balanced so they all remain viable) but I think that its a concept that is erroneously ported to tabletop rpgs causing only confusion and evil. 

I love unbalance in character creation. There is a dogma in the OSR that you cannot put too much mechanical weight on ability scores, because they are randomly generated. But that is not really aligned to B/X at all! 

A simple +1 in strength is +1 to hit AND damage! if we consider the classic conversion of every damage +1 becoming a +2 to-hit bonus, this means that a slightly stronger level 1 fighter hits as hard as a level 4 one. And that is just a +1. Providing you sell your INT or WIS to increase your prime attribute to +1, you will then be in disadvantage to the guy who rolled that +1 and did the same to reach +2 or +3

What about dexterity? it modifies both ranged to hit and AC. Getting a good dexterity sure makes a difference; so does a good constitution. Even rolling your first HD for hit points can make for a big difference: 1d8 hp can make you a 1 hp loser or a 8 hp guy that can withstand carelessly a sword thrust. 

The very "starting money" roll can decide if you start with the best armor in the game or just a shield. 

I like when some characters are stronger than others. Its okay. I think that the perceived importance of balance is that it allows everyone to have something to contribute equally at the table. But this is actually a mirage. The labor of GMs and games is not to give every character equal power: that would not even be possible, if we get deeper into that: Who's got more power? the character that can fight very well or the one that has a red hat? Well, you can say that fighting is more important, but that really depends on the setting. Maybe the campaign has no perspective of fights, but instead features a tribe of minotaurs that are hypnotized everytime they see something red. We cannot know. 

And that is ok too.

You can balance the thief vs the fighter, but for it to be meaningful, you have to make a campaign where there is as much important fights as there are locked doors to be picked. And, at that point, that presumed balance is shown to be a mantained illusion.

I made this houserules sometime ago, where all classes are dismantled and the weight is put on the ability scores, and they work. A high roll in constitution at the start makes you as capable of a level X fighter, both in attack bonus and health. A high roll in dexterity makes you a very competent thief. The only thing that remained tied to level was saves and XP necessary to level up. And some of the lowest rollers were just normal fighters and thieves and wizards. And everybody was ok with it. It is true that attributes could be raised over time with a roll-under mechanic, so the highest attributes were harder to raise, but that is more about a feeling of justice than about balance. 

When we played the Street Gang game, there was characters that were terribly unbalanced with others in combat, as there were some who picked a lot of useless skills (it was part of the fun). But balance, as everything does, also tends to sprout itself from its opposite. In an imbalanced party, balance appears very quickly: For example, the one that tends to fight better, also tends to fight more, thus, putting him or herself at risk much more than the ones that fight worse. This makes him much more likely to die fighting than a non-combatant in the long run.

In the same way, a thief is much more likely to be caught pick-pocketing than a character that doesn't know how to pickpocket in the first place: the skill is a skill and a curse, because an adventurer party is not composed by isolated peoples: it is ideally a group in which everyone pools their abilities together. There is balance in asking the tank to lead the way, or in refusing to accept a part in a plan if you feel that you don't have enough HP, skill, etc to succeed at it; and you propose a different approach instead.

Merry wasn't balanced at all with Legolas, yet both of them played an equally important part in their adventure. Legolas killed a lot of people in the battle of the Pelennor Fields, yet the one kill that Merry achieves alongside Eowen is the one we all remember better. It is not about giving your PCs the same firepower, be it real firepower, magic or thieving firepower. It is about putting them on an equally compelling situation and giving them the freedom to act as they see fit, inside their capabilities. You cannot fight the orcs as well as an elf archer? well, maybe you can try to negotiate with the ents. You don't need levels on anything for that! 

The worst kind of balance is like in 4e/5e and other modern games, when the balance is done blatantly around combat. I understand that you do that in a game that is solely about combat, but D&D is much more than that. You can argue that it is about retrieving treasure. But beyind that, it is about living adventures in a strange fantasy world. By balancing around combat, you are letting combat swallow the whole.

I remember some idea I had for running Searchers of the Unknown. I didn't knew why I liked it then, but I know why now. That game has no classes (just one: adventurer) or attributes whatsoever: the only difference among characters was the amount of HP rolled and your name. I devised some d6 table like this:

6: You start with 4000 XP (level 3). You are also cursed. The first time you get a natural 20 you will miss the roll instead.

5: You are a veteran: start with 2000 XP (level 2)

3-4: You start as normal

1-2: You are a kid: start with 1000 negative XP. You need to get those to get to level 1, and you have -2 hp until then. In exchange, you can once per life turn any roll into a success. 

I never ran SotU in the end, but it gives you an idea on how a little imbalance can be used to create nice dynamics on a game. What does it give that a character is more powerful than the rest? they are a team after all. Somebody being stronger is beneficial to every single one of them, because they can have powerful Aragorn who leads them and assumes greater risks in behalf of everyone. And at the same time, the same high capacity of their member can take the PCs into places too dangerous believing that their tank can carry them, until the tank dies or is wounded and they must carry their body back to the surface, through a zone that is 2 levels beyond them.

Note that the automatic success and the curse will only function once: they are secondary: ornamental complements to the real reason: this creates much more interesting in-game dynamics, assigns natural roles and draws much more potent images in the player's mind than just "you are 4 very similar fighters". 

If, for the contrary, they have a weakling on the group, they can still play around it searching for non-combat approaches, interacting with the game world, taking risks and try to improve with time, and even use their one-time roll in an epic moment, representing the victory of their raw innoncence. Because thats how a good "imbalance" is done: limiting an aspect of the character, but not in a way that stripes the game of the fun. If possible, do the opposite.