Play balance and campaign design

[Ra-Tiel]

D&D is a narrative game, not an adversarial one. So, why does balance really matter? :)

Sorry, but I must really disagree. In my mind, DnD is first a game, and second a narrative game. And in a game I expect everyone to have the same chances. If you say that balance doesn't matter, you may have fun playing a 20 point-buy fighter in a party with 50 point-buy clerics, druids, and wizards. Well, I would rather not.

If other characters can do your schtick better than you can, it very quickly becomes very boring.

If the narrative is more exciting and interesting with the nifty combat stunt, doesn't that improve the game more? I will say that if the combat is PC vs PC, then keeping things strictly balanced might be more important. (It still might not, it depends on what the players are expecting out of it) Still, usually the players are working together against a common enemy.

I'm not saying that the game cannot be narrative. I am saying that no matter how narrative it becomes, the game's mechanics and rules should be and stay the final arbiter of what goes and what does not. So, in my games you shouldn't expect any bonuses above and beyond what the rules already allow for a character (+2 from using a mw toolkit, or +2 from flanking). Definitively not, however, a +4 bonus because someone described a "really cool" attack move. :-|

These two stances may appear contradictory at first, so I'll explain a bit more: in the first case, I'm talking about making sure the character's skill is independent of the player's in specific things. A character shouldn't get a bonus to climb out of a pit because the player is an excellent climber; a character shouldn't get a bonus talking his way out of a situation because the player is good at talking his way out of things either.

True. And my stance isn't that different from that. ;)

However, I am fully in favor of the notion of roleplaying as a cooperatively created story, and I like the idea of giving characters a bonus if the players can be descriptive and imaginative, and add to the overall flow of the narrative, rather than just acting like they're giving input to a text adventure from the 80s.

If the bonus is at most +2/-2 ("favorable conditions") I guess I could see a point to it. However, anything that goes further is way out of what I would accept. :)

TAKE ROCK. THROW ROCK AT ORC. TAKE GOLD. :D

Wrong. Dead wrong. That reads: "USE stone WITH orc". :P :D

As long as the the Bard can have a 1/1 BAB for a social skill and the fighter can have a 3/4 BAB in social skill, then I have no problem with the above statement.

But what if the system is not the way you describe? As far as DnD is concerned, the bard is at 3/4 combat BAB with a 1/1 social BAB, while the fighter is at 1/1 combat BAB and like 1/100 social BAB. :?:

If the combat systems and the social systems work similarly and the bard has social hit point advantages, similar amounts of social skill advantages, social armor advantages, the amount of magical items found that affect social situations and combat situations roughly equal,and the amounts of experience given out are roughly equal, then they should be treated the exact same.  If those game balance requirements are not really met by the system being used, then perhaps you have to treat them differently.

There was a very interesting approach once on the WotC forums for handling social interactions. It revolved around making a character's social skills into virtual HP reserves and the Cha mod into something like an attack bonus. Skill checks were made in turn, with each party reducing the opposition's HPs until one of them was down to 0, which caused them to lose this skill contest. It was very interesting, but a bit cumbersome to implement. However, I really liked the basic idea, to make social interactions (which to be honest DnD utterly sucks at) more similar to combat interactions (which are handled quite well in DnD).

If Combat is treated differently (read that as preferenctially, if you prefer) than other parts of the game, than you can't really compare other parts of the game to combat.

But there still should be some sort of mechanics related to that. Why should the character's social ability be the only thing that is not covered by mechanics? This would break the basic idea behind roleplaying games: that you can be someone/-thing you're not in real-life. Why should the wizard be able to throw around fireballs and summon demons when the player has ZERO knowledge about mythology and mysticism, why should the fighter be able to swing his greatsword all day long when the player couldn't pick up a dagger without cutting himself? But the bard (or "party face") requires his player have real ability and social competence?

[...] But if I have a scene in a ballroom late at night with a large crowd and a lot of social conseqence on the line, and a PC is asked to dance, and his skill on the dancefloor will betray a lot to the onlookers, and the rule system in question has little or nothing about dancing in their ruleset (and courtly manners or diplomacy is NOT dancing), then, yeah, I'd expect a GM in that situaltion to give an advantage to a Player who knows something about it becasue the rules don't cover that.

I see your point. And what about combat situations that are not covered by the rules (like throwing a grappled target, or cutting of extremities)? Do you handwave that as a DM, too, or do you tell the player "sorry pal, but the rules don't allow/cover that; please take a different action"?

Also, I do think that "dancing" could be covered by diplomacy. It's just a way of applying an appropriate abstraction layer as to what skills represent and what they do not. And after all, the DM could always substitute a DEX or CHA check for things that don't have an appropriate skill associated with them (like the good olde days (tm) ;) ).

Also, I like the approach from the Star Wars rpg very much ("Heroic Skills"). Just because someone has 0 ranks in climb does not mean he couldn't climb over a fence, just like 0 ranks in diplomacy don't mean that you couldn't barter for a better price at the market. It's just that in "heroic" situations you won't get anywhere with your "non-heroic" abilities.

And treating a social situation the same as a combat system has got to go both ways.  If the system weights the usefulness of both and goes into them both with a lot of detail, and lets players really specialize and thrive in both, then treat them the same.  Otherwise, I consider them apples and oranges.

Not really. They both belong to the same game, they both are decisive elements the characters (and players) are exposed to, and they both influenece the outcome of the campaign/story arc. I agree that it would be perfect for a system to handle both things with the same degree of detail, but that's just wishing for the best. We have to settle with the imperfections of the systems used and go with it, or try to modify and house-rule the mechanics we consider lacking.

I'm also not going to lie to any of you and tell you combat resolution doesn't take up more tiem than anything else in my system, but we've tried very hard (with over 22 social-type skills available) to have some interesting balance for the players that want to improve their social skills.

22 social skills? :huh: Now that is alot for sure. :P

<thread-derailing>
And what skills were that? How much did you go into detail? What situations did you decide to handle with a seperate skill, and which ones did you roll together into one skill? :) (You can also reply with a PM if you want, to not have the thread go too far off-topic.)
</thread-derailing>

[the_taken]

I've skipped ahead halfway thru the page.

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The biggest problem I've seen with social interaction is that there's usually only one "Face" to the party, while in realitly there are many potential ways anyone can contribute to social encounters:

Connections
"You know who" says "you know what"...
Some character's diplomatic skills may not actually be anything worth noting, but they have connections to a hierarchy that gives their words the weight of their organiztion.
Soldier types, priest types and roylaty are usauly using this.

Diplomancy
What a nice chicken you have. I bet it be a fair trade for this sword.
Thinking with words outside the box, diplomancers manipulate the thinking of others into agreements with the right question at the right time.
This is the primary characteristic of the Nice Guy, and the Vampire Politician.

Disguise
No! You're the imposter!

If you can't build a social standing, steel it!

Biggest Giant
Me Ugo! Me wants muffin!

When people are scared of you 'cause your capable of smashing their house with your face, they're more likely to agree with what you say, or ataleast get out of you're way.

Sex Apeal
I am Sir Lace-a-lot! *glint*

When you're gorgeous enough, you can get away with just anything. Batt you eyes, flex some muscle, or just smile. They'll let you off.

[snakefing]

So much going on here, and such limited time to reply...

If other characters can do your schtick better than you can, it very quickly becomes very boring.

play balance[/i] rather than mechanical balance. Play balance is to ensure that every player has fun. Mechanical balance is about keeping the rule-defined abilities of characters in balance. Play balance is what really matters; mechanical balance is only a tool toward that end.

If a given rule set is unbalanced in certain ways, a skillful GM can compensate for that. But it is better if he doesn't have to.

For example, in the D&D rule set, fighter characters are somewhat gimped when it comes to social skills. Fewer skill points, mechanical advantages to using CHA as a dump stat (and to a lesser extent, INT), and class skill list that provides only the second class social skill Intimidate. Mechanically, this is in balance because the fighter's combat abilities are supposed to be her forte. But if you want to run a campaign that is, say, 60/20/20 social interaction/problem solving/combat, the lack of social skills threatens to leave the fighter's player with precious little to do 60% of the time. 60% boredom is not a good ratio - play balance is out of whack.

So if you are playing this rule set, as GM you need to make some special efforts to compensate for that. There's a number of things you can do. Here are some I can think of or that have come up in this thread:

Create house rules to give the fighter some shot at some social skills, without stealing the thunder from classes that are supposed to shine in these situations.
*Design a campaign setting with various military orders, factions, or whatnot. Then encourage (or require) fighter characters to belong to them - give them their own special social settings where they will have more to do.
*Encourage a play style where all the players have input even if it is only one character that is acting.

On the other hand, if you are running a campaign that slants 50/50 combat/social interaction, then you need to worry equally about both sides of the coin. Combats need to be designed to ensure that non-combat oriented characters can at least participate, even if they won't be entirely as effective, and the social milieu needs to be designed so that more combat-oriented characters are engaged socially. This can be approached from a mechanical standpoint, but also from the standpoint of designing a campaign world or designing encounters that provide options or opportunities even for the non-specialists.

[beejazz]

Now we're talking about social skills?

In that case, I'd say that the difficulty of an action varies. The difficulty of convincing an NPC of an implausible lie is higher than the difficulty of convincing an NPC of a plausible lie. I'm not going to fault a player for stuttering or mumbling, but I'm not going to have NPCs believing the sky is purple and that the grass is cotton candy because my PC wanted to bluff his way out of taking blame for breaking into someone's home.

In combat, again, "description" only counts if it changes the actual nature of the action. If the player is fighting on a subway train, he may punch a mook in the face... or he'll run up to the mook, grab the mook's face, and slam the guy's head into one of those vertical poles they've got on the trains so people can stand. In the first instance, that's an aoo and some piddling subdual damage. In the second case, there's the charge and bull rush through an impassable object, dealing a bit of (probably still piddling) lethal damage and knocking the guy prone. Why? 'Cause the guy actually *did* something cool rather than describing something mundane with an unnecessary verbosity.

I'm not going to penalize charisma skills for poor delivery if the statement/action makes some sense, nor am I going to give a mechanical benefit to wordy description like "I flail wildly" or "I use my balogna strike" in combat. Unless they have the balogna strike feat, but that's something else entirely.

As for balance, I maintain that the stricter balance on combat stems from its lethal nature. Dying sucks lotsa times.

[Epic Meepo]

If you let players "bypass" the rules regarding social encounters, do you allow them the same leeway with combats?

If you allow a player to bypass a difficult social situation accompanied with tough diplomacy/sense motive/bluff checks by using some of his real-life skill with words, would you allow them to bypass a hard combat by using some of his real-life skill with martial arts and/or archaic weapons?[/quote]Why should a player who has a great way with words be able to get away with automatically "solving" social encounters without checks while playing a "dumb" character, while a not-so-eloquent player is forced to rely on his character's skills and thus incurs the chance of failure?[/quote]I've had encounters with DMs who thought that giving additional bonuses above and beyond that to players who described more or less insane and/or impossible (but K.E.W.L. (tm)) stunts and maneuvers was ok.[/quote]Well, that's just silly. Unless you're playing a Hong Kong action rpg like Feng Shui; then, describing a kewl stunt is a prerequisite for any combat bonus.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

I would have to say that RPG is a "narrative game" with adversarial elements in the form of principal antagonists provided by the DM in the course of narrative. (Usually if the DM is the adversary against whom players are trying to "win" something is wrong with the conduct of the game, outside of a few exceptions such as Paranoia where this would indicate the game is being run correctly if not well. . .) I place great emphasis on this actually in defining the very root concept of RPGs prior to any consideration of system and/or setting. The point I will be shortly trying to make regarding topic is that mechanical balance is an essential prerequisite for balance of narrative play - where it is lacking in the system used the DM is forced to rely on other skills to establish it obliquely in game.

In order to explain the statements above I will first presume to declare (what I readily acknowledge to be my pet theory regarding the matter), that RPG's (owe their original immediate and subsequent amazing growth in popularity to the fact that they) are a revival of (an art nearly lost in our culture,) the traditional oral storytellers' circle, in a fashion which further extends and enhances the fundamental basis of it's appeal to an unprecedented degree. It is difficult to distill that basis to a succinct description, the gist of which is a definite "magical" something that is experienced in the course of the art's traditional performance, being received and subsequently carried away in the psyches of the listeners. Those here who have had the opportunity to experience real expression of the tradition will have an intuitive grasp of what I'm referring to (and if you can name or give a concise description of that something, please do). Joseph Campbell referred to the social function and value of this extensively in his work, offering numerous cultural examples. In what is probably it's fullest cultural expression, among Aboriginal Australians absolutely nothing is considered real in this world until it has a story, because it is quite explicitly the act of telling it's story that makes a thing real.

Looking beyond that origin then, while in a traditional storytelling circle there is a single storyteller (at a time) and a group of essentially passive listeners who may often request, "Tell us a story about (insert favorite character here, e.g., Finn McCoul)," in an RPG circle there is no separate audience because, everyone is a storyteller telling the stories of their favorite characters concurrently. As someone mentioned earlier, playing an RPG is cooperative storytelling. The DM is a "story leader" providing a dynamic contextual setting (meta-story) in which the circle of storytellers cooperate as  the DM guides them in braiding all of their individual stories into the an extremely synergetic whole by virtue of which the experience of that "something" is increased exponentially. The DM is then responsible for ensuring thatno individual character or story overshadows the others in the meta-story created. In order to do this, the game mechanics of the chosen system are the principal, vital tool by which an appropriate balance of all of the elements composing the whole is maintained. If the tool isn't balanced, the artwork produced through its use will likewise be imbalanced.

The DM must also ensure that no storytellers overshadow the rest in the conduct of the circle.
[blockquote[Snakefing]. . .how does balance translate from the "theoretical" balance of game design to the reality of game play on a particular night in a specific adventure in your individual campaign/group? . . .How do you tweak your character creation or campaign design to ensure that players come up with characters that are "balanced" in the sense of having both combat and non-combat roles to play, taking into account the needs of your particular players and campaign setting?[/blockquote]
I don't think you can really tweak the rules in any way to significantly improve that balance. This is more dependent upon the DM's skills in creating first, a setting in which those non-combat roles can actually matter and second, a dynamic campaign within that setting in which the various specific roles (combat and non-combat) chosen by the players will equally matter to the whole - the story - coupled with skills in leading group dynamics during play - the telling. Some chapters (nights) will certainly highlight some more than others but in a good story this will even out as the various chapters are collected. On the flip side, the meta-story must also be crafted so that no roles which have not been chosen by players are necessary to the plot - just as you don't stuff a party down a wood-chipper without a cleric present (or bard now in a pinch) nor send them to fight an army without a main battle tank (presumably at the head of the column), you likewise simply don't make the successful conclusion of a peace summit a plot requirement if no one has chosen to play a character capable of fulfilling a role suited to accomplishing this.

[Etarnon]

I don't believe there needs to be balance, as long as the setting is interesting, and full of challenges, some classes, and races might be slighted due to reasons of campaign setup.

If the campaign is all about courtly politics, the half orc barbarian has no place, nor in my mind Should he. If a player wants to play that, I advise them, going in, there's not going to be much for you to do, if you go that route, but if you want to, be my guest.

Likewise, I'm not really pleased of the drift from roleplaying bonus resolution to difficulty (say a CHA check in 1e AD&D, modified by the actually player's speech, to affect the difficulty of the roll) to this kind of table-ized strict accounting of plussed and minuses, all guided by the 3.X rules set as to what modifier when.

It really detracts from the running of the campaign for me, because in the end, a skill check is a rules look-up, not a simple ruling of the moment, and a player can sit back and say "Make a speech? I've got +10 to my skill. Screw that!", and tosses the dice.

A lot got lost along the way to what passes for "Roleplaying These days, a la D&D."

[Nomadic]

I agree. A vital part of balancing is in how the DM runs things. If this wasn't true then we could all just have computers DM our sessions (which some have attempted with varying degrees of success).

The human mind is for now still an important part of the DnD experience. It is up to the DM to find that necessary balance, which is why the best DMs I find are the ones who can think workable things up on the fly and run with ideas as the game goes.