I’ve seen a few discussions around town about game balance and the joys and heartaches of it. The necessity of it and the irrelevance of it have been amply elaborated on. Even ambivalence to it has been addressed. So what more is there to say?

The discussion itself is largely a mismatch in objectives.

The thing is, “balance”, whatever that is (and it’s worth pausing to note that it’s so weakly defined that any argument can be put forth strongly on any side), is an implementation detail and we keep reading about it as though it were a requirement (or that its contrary was a requirement). Balance is not a requirement. Rather it is a way to achieve something else.

Now it’s unfair of me to imply that no one else sees this — everyone who talks about it bangs on the idea in some way or other, from some direction, but let me try to whittle it down and expose it and see what sorts of things satisfy the real requirement (if there is one). My instinct here is that both camps have the same requirement and different implementations, but I could be out to lunch here.

A typical role-playing game assumes that we have some small number of people, from 3-6 (yes some games are different and yes, you often play with only two people or as many as thirty but who cares) and that one will mediate and the others act and react under her mediation. Now, in this arrangement everyone wants to have a good time playing this role-playing game. Presumably, that means they want their characters (their roles) to get some time engaging the problems presented and managed by the mediator. Some may want more of this time and some might want less, but everyone is there at least nominally to get some of it.

It is a well-known fact that humans do not communicate well when everyone talks at once.

These two facts work together to demand some kind of turn-taking, whether it’s a round system (you, she goes, he goes, I go…) or a scripting system (we all write down our orders and reveal them, taking turns narrating it or letting a mediator narrate it) or whatever. We can’t all talk at once. We all are there to talk.

Okay so we have humans competing for talking time. This is usually called “spotlight” but I am not calling it that because lots of folks use the term to also or solely mean time when the story is about their character. I’m only a little bit interested in that, because it’s satisfiable by the mediator talking about your character and that’s not what I care about.

Some people want more and some people want less, but everyone is there to get a share of the role-playing time. So that’s the requirement: everyone wants a piece of the pie.

In a game where most interaction is mechanical or derived from mechanism, the way you get some face time is by having dice to throw.

In a game where most interaction is free-form, the way you get some face time is by manipulating the mediator, whether socially or through rules that might exist for getting her attention.

Now we can see how balance is an implementation: one way to make sure everyone gets the face time they want is to make sure that all of their characters are equally capable so that each player has the opportunity to engage the story with a play that is strategically appropriate.¹ Where a table (that is, a game plus a certain group of people) is all about cool stories and not explicit success in task resolutions, everyone still wants their face time but they may prefer to fail in order to get a cool scene about failure.  Or about how weak their participation is and how badly they feel about that.

And there’s where balance as a requirement grinds.

Balance (and its brother, niche protection) is a way to manage certain kinds of face time. Lack of balance is also a way to manage certain kinds of face time. So the requirement a designer needs to get her head around answers the question, “What sorts of face time should my game guarantee?”

Niche protection follows the answer “everyone must have something to do on average”.

Balance follows the answer “everyone must succeed as often as everyone else”. ²

Lack of balance follows the answer “everyone should be able to bring a novel story to the narrative”. Maybe. Something like that, anyway. I am waving my hands here.

These implementations (with the possible exception of niche protection when you look at it funny) all focus on what we can do for the character or the player. I wonder how interesting that is. Let’s explore a little.

Something I am always conscious of (partially because I have been openly critical of games that are not conscious of it) is the fact that we have many people at the table and each correlates to a character in play. Yes, that’s a very traditional structure. For games that lie outside this expectation, move on — I suspect that the whole issue we’re on about here is uninteresting for those games.³ We can get all mechanical and balance things and protect niches, but all of that is addressing symptoms. Let’s examine a systemic approach to the disease.

What if your game acknowledges this structure as a basic premise and uses it, providing some way to manage the group activity rather than patch individual activity? What if, because your game will be played by multiple people acting roughly in concert, your game is also about multiple characters acting roughly in concert? And I mean “about” in a deep way, not just that it happens to be true, but rather that the game deliberately and mechanically supports exactly this. The setting implies or demands it. The mechanisms support it. The players are told that it is expected. From the moment you start making characters, it is clear.

It strikes me that any mechanisms that support this necessarily also support face time issues.

And this is why Diaspora and soon Soft Horizon have calculated success curves for resolution that are best managed by supporting action. In Diaspora it’s mostly a hint (really successful tactical play requires teamwork but you can get by, often boringly, without it) and I think in Soft Horizon it will be a demand (many challenges will be impossible for a lone individual to succeed at).

Again, this is implementation. It is not the case that all games should do this.

If it is not likely, mechanically, for a single character to succeed at an important task without support, then two things happen. First, the table of players must communicate to develop a strategy for success, and second, the characters must act in concert (each getting face time for their piece of the puzzle) in order to execute the plan. By assuming a team and developing a system that expects (or demands) a team, we get team participation both in and out of the narrative. We don’t actually care about balance, necessarily (though in these particular games we have it) and we don’t care about niche protection. We can have it or not and still get (and eat) our cakes.

Games where each player acts alone and in turn (I swing with my sword. I cast my spell. I heal the fighter) bore the hell out of me. Having a niche is a partial solution, but it assumes a certain tactical pattern for success and that also bores the hell out of me — when I play D&D, say, I like it when everyone decides to play a thief. The heterogeneous party that the mechanisms of the game expect (more with every revision) are stultifying. Assuming only that the challenges are overcome by teams and not by a succession of individual actions is way cooler.

To me, in my opinion, your mileage may vary. Bottom line, though, is that balance is an implementation detail. So let’s stop arguing about whether or not it’s a requirement.

–BMurray