Thursday, August 7, 2008

RPG Balance

I ran across this article in my morning RSS feeds. I like it and I thought I'd share it as it sums up nicely my thoughts on balance w/r to RPGs (not wargames/not MMOs).

LINK.

I bring this up because when I was ramping up for my Eberron campaign, one of the players complained that he felt Warforged were "over power/unbalanced". This of course sandwiches nicely with the fact that the party I'm playing with has a lot of +1 ECL races in the mix.

There is the caveat to this that he doesn't address that you need to not break the verisimilitude and you need to not always go after the "Red button" on the character. Still...

1 comment:

Ethereal Council, Dalyth Prime said...

A very well written essay indeed.

Player's characters having differing levels of abilities only becomes a problem with it's made to be one.

If all the players have fun things to do, if all the players are rewarded, if all the players have a chance to pull their weight, then there's no problem.

If one player gets to do all the cool stuff, or all one player's moments are at another player's expense, or if one player's character continually has to babysit another player's character, then there's a problem, and it's one that a rulebook-- even the perfect rulebook-- cannot solve.

If you're the GM, btw, it's your job to find a way to solve the problem. If you're the player, btw, it's your job to make sure it never becomes a problem in the first place.