Modular Gaming Components 4 - Imbalance

 You know what I said in the second post...

... ignore it. 

I'll clarify that a bit.

When I said that a switch needs a good balance to it, weighing up the pros of the potential advantage and cons of the potential disadvantage, that's still kind of true. But a good narrative isn't always about balance. 

I've written that players are often participating in roleplaying sessions for a combination of escapism and telling a good story. That escapism often requires letting them do things easily and show off their characters strengths, but a good story often has obstacles where the characters are underdogs and have little chance of success. Imbalance often swings between extremes. Sometimes the heroes are on top of the world, sometimes they are facing drama, sometimes they have no idea what they're doing because they don't have all the facts. I like to make sure things swing in all sorts of directions, as long as it can be justified by the narrative.

3rd Edition D&D (and 3.5) prided itself on the idea of having balanced encounters for the players to face. I remember that the calculations had been worked out so that if players faced 13 encounters with a challenge rating equal to their level, then they'd go up a level. 4 level 5 characters should face 4 opponents with an average level or challenge rating of 5. It started to get a bit screwy if those four level 5 characters faced a pair of level 10 characters, a single level 20 character, or a level 17 and three level 1s. But as long as the numbers were roughly similar...it was all good. There was also some kind of economy where a "balanced" encounter should consume a number of items and potions roughly proportional to the level of the characters. Let's say 20 GP per level (that's not specifically the number, but it give an idea). So a level 1 encounter might use 20 GP wouldn't use much, but by the time you got to level 3 it's expected that you'd use a healing potion, or some other minor potion at a value of 50GP to get through the encounter, or a few flasks of oil to burn your opposition. By the time you're at level 5 you might be using a pair of basic healing potions (or some other combination), or maybe a greater healing potion. It was an interesting, but really regimented way of running a game....so naturally I ignore it completely. (I also mentioned this in the last series too)

I think 4th ed D&D pushed this type of thing even harder, but I never got into that. A few other games have similarly put a focus on balance. and while that's great for a wargame (but something Games Workshop has been trying to fine tune in it's Warhammer lines for decades), but when telling a story I actually tend to think that balance is over-rated and even detrimental.

Instead of balancing encounters, I just throw hints to the players and their characters. I let them hear rumours that something is tough before they confront it, or that people haven't come back when they've tried to face it... conversely, they might hear rumours about someone almost taking out the opponent and leaving it in a weakened state. If I throw a couple of comments in the direction of the characters suggesting that a threat is to strong for them, I won't pull any punches. If characters die, they die. I'll try to make it suitably epic, or if I can't make it epic then I'll at least try to make it funny. But if they do stupid things, they get appropriate outcomes.

This post was prompted by my second night running a game at the local bar's "Medieval Tavern Night". and a few comments that were made by some of my players...two of whom had only ever played under  one Dungeon Master, and two of who had never played a roleplaying game before.

One of the players who had never participated in a roleplaying session before asked me "What do you think of Murderhoboes?" (I'm paraphrasing here). He'd clearly done a bit of research, had been talking to other members of hid friend circle who'd played before, and had intentions for a certain brand of escapism in mind. I'm not completely against the concept, if everyone's on board and we've all decided to go that way with our session. But when a few players want to take the game in one direction (let's call it the "dramatic" path), and a few players want go another direction (lets call it the "murder-hobo" path), then those two groups will have tension against each other. I addressed the three-way tension in a previous post, and said that the players, the narrator, and the rules all pull against one another to make the story... but if the players aren't in alignment, then it becomes a four-way tension and less predictable in outcome. My method of promoting a certain style of play is to make sure the players don't get bored, and the type of story we're telling as a group remains fun. That player didn't even try to kill everything in his path, he was having too much fun otherwise with lots of puzzles and interactions. Balance didn't really matter here. I could have told a good story with dramatic tension and facing off against overwhelming odds if the balance had been against the players, or I could have pitted the players against each other with ethical dilemmas and moral grey areas (because this can add a lot of depth to the play experience). 

The other interesting comment, from that players partner (who also hadn't played before) was that she was fascinated by the way I had all sorts of things prepared, but also seemed to be ad-libbing and riffing off the choices made by the players. She thought it was funny when I'd let people attempt ludicrous things and say "you can try it", "let's see what the dice say", or even "I'll just allow that one through because it's funny" (more often than not it wasn't just how funny the suggestion was, but it was about how well I could work with it along one of the three or four potential scenarios unfolding in my head at any given time). The aim here is to push back against the players in a fun way, or help pull them along when the rules seem to be getting in the way of a fun experience. As long as the game keeps moving, players have a tendency to not get hung up on the minutiae. Similarly, while I try to make sure enough of the loose ends are tied up to give a satisfying conclusion to a session, I often don't leave everything neatly packaged up because life just doesn't work like that and I always want to end leaving them wanting more (as I mentioned back in mid-February). (Note: It's probably true that this can be one of my weaknesses as a game narrator and sometimes my ending feel a bit rushed to me, or a bit vague, it's certainly something I've been trying to work on over the past few years.)

Of the players who was new and had only ever played D&D under a single Dungeon Master, said to me that he actually had a lot of fun and it felt to him like everyone was important to the story (he said more, but I'll get to that bit). There's a lot to unpack here. He had paid for the session, but his friends had played with me last month, they must have convinced him that I run a decent game, especially since they all showed up an hour early to make sure they got seats at my table. But that comment of "he actually had a lot of fun", and particularly the word actually in the middle of it said that he'd had bad experiences at gaming tables... and it seemed like he had been having more bad experience than good lately, but he still kept going along because of his social group. He had a few interesting ideas during the course of play, and I made sure to never shoot them down, instead using my typical uncertainty principle and letting dice guide the outcome when it could be clever, funny, or dramatic. He got a bit more experimental later in the game, and I played with it. It kind of felt like he was getting his groove...even though it was an 8 player game, and I really didn't think I was giving enough attention to everyone, and probably letting some of the players get away from me. That led to his second point. Even though I felt like I wasn't giving everyone enough spotlight time, he did think that the balance was there...so had the two players who hadn't played before. That was a nice bit of validation. The final thing that this player said was that he sometimes struggled to go week-by-week to his regular game because they might spend all session in a single combat, and sometimes individual rounds in that combat might last a while when rulebooks are broken out and cross-referenced both before and after dice are rolled. We didn't crack a rulebook at all during the 3.5 hours of play, just kept things moving, kept them interesting, and diversified the story between a range of puzzles, mysteries, exploration, and drama, with a few scattered combats just to show our new players how that side of things worked. 

There were going to be two big combats at the end, one against a sentient tree (something like an ent or a floral hydra), and one against a horde of bandits (maybe forty bandits against the player characters). I knew from the outset that this wasn't balanced and the players would have to think carefully and cleverly to either avoid the conflict, or solve the issues in some other way. They were having fun solving the puzzles, so I ran with that idea for the majority of the story. Balance just didn't bother me at all while the story flowed, and it didn't seem to bother the players either.