Editorial Josh Sawyer Explains: How to Balance an RPG

[felipepepe]

Oh, you're right. I'm playing it with my brother, both with the lone wolf perk, so it became a co-op game in my head... I forgot that you can play alone with a full party of 4 guys.

 

[HiddenX]

You call it hysteria - I call it observation.

 

[Telengard]

If every character works - where is the fun and challenge to create a character or a well balanced party of characters?

By Josh's logic I could start a game immediatly with a fully randomized party - it would still work ->

But, what about the people who want to roleplay as a clutzy, stammering, super-robust thief? Or as a dumb, glass-jawed, hulking wizard? Why would you punish them by making their choices any less valid than anyone else's? Do you want to ruin their fun?

After all, it's not ability that makes a hero. It's the special power inside that makes a person a hero. And every single person is special in their own unique way. And that special power inside us can be used to cast spells or to wield weapons better, because that special power is the magic inside us all. Everyone has that special magic inside them. Every single individual is their own unique flower just waiting to be recognized for the specialness inside them. Everyone is a hero, in their own unique but equally valid way.

*

Wait, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I haven't known Josh to be one to dodge accountability or deflect blame. I've known him to own his mistakes and to learn from them. I would be surprised to see him make excuses, either publicly or to himself. (If it does appear that some statement he makes sounds like an excuse, consider there may be other perspectives to what he was actually saying and that he might have meant it in that context, not as an excuse.)

I don't doubt you, but we know different "Sawyers". You know the person, I know the games and quotes that I come across. I was referring specifically to this quote from Gamebanshee:

Some of the most fun in RPG's I've had lately have been from Spiderweb Software. They scratch that old-school itch for me, and they do it while constrained by an outdated, ugly graphic engine, because they are extremely tightly designed. They feel a lot like IE games, even though they're completely turn-based. And their mechanics don't look a damn thing like DnD and are better for it.

That's genuinely cool, but we didn't Kickstart a game called Fuck You: Suck My Dick: Josh Sawyer's Personal Dream RPG Experience where I do whatever I personally think is sound and neat and good. For better or worse, this was pitched as an IE-like game. It's great that you view the experiences as more abstract than the nuts and bolts, but no, people clearly do not trust me/us to make a good game that is significantly mechanically different. And I know from experience that sort of attitude can poison a player's entire reception of the game.

I have had the pleasure to work on a project where I just got to do whatever I wanted and that was pretty cool. I don't know how many people would have played that weird-ass game, but the publisher wasn't really concerned, so I went wild. Very few projects are like that. This project is not like that and I feel like we have never pitched it as though it were.

I think this is a cop out. As HiddenX quoted above, he's against core aspects of D&D - the game is very far from being D&D already - so saying "I'm doing what the fans want, not what I want" is silly. Just think of how many aspects of IE games were removed already: the entire D&D ruleset, multi-classing, utility spells (knock, invisibility), pre-buffing, stealing from shops, hard counters, equipment requirements, etc...

It comes out as disingenuous to change things so much and then say you're simply doing an IE-like game, not a "significantly mechanically different game". PoE looks similar, but IS very different mechanically, I think that's pretty clear to anyone who played it.

OMG, I can't believe he thinks spiderweb games have better design than D&D, what a fucking moron.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

1) Do whatever you want at character creation - your character will not be bad, every build works.

Is there any world in which 1 and 3 are a bad thing?

Codex, 2014.

Every build is sacred
Every build is great
If a build is wasted
Josh gets quite irate

Every build is wanted
Every build is good
Every build is needed
In your neighborhood

its as if there is a whole generation that gets butt hurt and has their feelings hurt when a person or game even hints that they might not have done something well. So we have combat with no missing, because it makes people feel bad about themselves and their choices....so instead we just average it all out into DPS... We have systems where you can't make mistakes and all choices are valid and good and every person is important and special in there own way!

Fucking pathetic generation of fagots and failures, ruining everything they come in contact with. They hate complicated rule based RPGS, but like fagot elves and faeries and romancing store keepers and gnomes, so they ruin RPG's for the rest of us... Get your skinny jeans on and go to your cuddle party faggots...lol

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I like how I'll be able to make a character based on which dialogue checks I want to pass while having the assurance that that character won't be dead weight in combat when played to the strengths of its build regardless of which class I ultimately go with.

Going with high per/res/int obviously, pretty high pressure on Josh to fix the first two.

why is it important in a single player party based RPG that every single character be good at combat? that sounds boring actually

 

[FeelTheRads]

Especially in one in which according to Infinitron the combat isn't even the real game.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Might is not strength. A character with a high might is only good at doing damage and healing faster. There is no indication of them being muscled, or being able to lift large rocks.
Magic, ranged and melee are actually the same, because they all use the exact same resolution mechanism.

So, can you play a muscle wizard? Not as such, no. But then again, if you call that muscle wizard a barbarian, all is working as intended. Both will do more damage when mightier, and have larger AoE when more intelligent.

The only thing that won't fit the picture of that barbarian being a muscled wizard is the animation displayed on the screen.

 

[Infinitron]

Especially in one in which according to Infinitron the combat isn't even the real game.

wat

Might is not strength.

Actually, it is.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Actually, it is.

So, the more muscles, the more room for your Soul? Or the stronger your Soul? Soul Power, literally ;-)

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Might should be renamed to Power IMO. Describe it as representing the power of one's soul which manifests itself in overcoming tough physical challenges, being more lethal in combat etc.

 

[felipepepe]

Doesn't matter the name, making a gunshot do more damage is retarded with any name.

 

[Shannow]

Since when is a classless RPG 'bringing something new and fresh to the table'? It's not exactly a novel concept.

In party-based fantasy games? They appear a lot in post-apocalyptic or modern-age games, but I the last classless fantasy game was what, Ishar?

Vampire the Maskerade: Redemption (not fully class-less but close)
Blackguards
Shadowrun Returns
Drakensang (not fully class-less but close)
EDIT: M&B
EDIT2: Dungeon Siege 1+2 /EDIT

Just off of the top of my head.

In another point:
Tuluse argues that magic is intrinsic and doesn't require study in Harry Potter. A series that is all about children studying magic...*rolleyes*
Similar stuff can be said about Starwars. (I know, his main point was about INT, but still...)

And a second point:
Infinitron mentioned that the reason for not taking OGL/Pathfinder was that OE "deserve" their own IP system. Why not make a better system? At least better than OGL/Pathfinder.

Spoiler

How does this fit together with Sawyer not making his dream-system?

 

[HiddenX]

This article about balancing from the makers of Xulima is very good IMHO:

Balancing in non-linear RPGs

Balancing the difficulty in games is always a complicated issue, and depending on the genre, the way the story is told, and the game’s mechanics, it can be a VERY complicated issue:

Linear vs Non-Linear
As one would expect, balancing the difficulty in a linear game is fairly straightforward. If you know the path that the player will be following from the beginning to the end, then you know perfectly well exactly when they will arrive at each point in the game and can set the difficulty accordingly. When a game strives to be non-linear, it has to be designed with the understanding that players may advance through the world in any order they chose. Adjusting the difficulty in this case is exponentially more difficult.

RPGs vs Other Types of Games
An additional component in RPGs is character development and leveling. In games like Crysis or Super Mario Bros, the character has the same abilities at the beginning of the game that it has at the end. The only change is in the experience of the player, who becomes more proficient with the character as the game progresses. In an RPG, the abilities of the character or party vary and change over time. When the player encounters a specific enemy, the character’s, or group’s, abilities may be very different from what the games designers expected for that particular moment in the game.

Action vs Strategy
In an action game, when the player encounters a much stronger enemy, there is almost always the possibility that the player can win by using different tactics like running away to heal and then attacking again. For example, in the Gothic series, with a little ability and patience you can defeat a Shadowbeast when you are just a level one character. Easier enemies, then, are no bother at all. Knowing how to win, you can finish them in a manner of seconds.

In turn-based games, a difficult opponent can be impossible to defeat no matter what strategy is employed, which makes high level enemies actually quite difficult to defeat. On the other hand, combat against easy opponents in this system can quickly become tedious, even if it only lasts for less than a minute.

Auto-Scaling Enemies and Treasures
Of all of the innovations that modern RPGs have contributed to gaming (some good, some less so) there is one, that in my opinion, is so horrible that it destroys the very essence of an RPG: auto-scaling the levels of the enemies and treasures to match the level of the player so that the difficulty and rewards are constant throughout.

The technique basically consists of dynamically altering the level of the game to present the same challenge (enemies), and rewards (treasure), during the entire play experience through the use of one of these methods:

• Directly auto-scaling the level of the enemies and treasure to match that of the player: If you are at level one and you encounter a rat, then the rat will be level one. If you run into that same rat when you are level 30, then the rat will be level 30.
• Changing one type of enemy for another: If you go into a cave while you’re at level one it will be full of rats. If the designer chooses to employ this technique, then if you don’t enter that same cave until you are level 30, you won’t encounter rats but in their place you will find powerful level 30 vampires.
• Setting the level of the area the first moment that the player enters: If you go into the Tower of Sorcery at level one, the enemies there will be set at level one and if you leave and come back later they will still be at level one. If the first time you enter is at level 30, then the enemies will be 30th level enemies. At least in this method they stay at the same level for the rest of the game.

There are many examples of games like this: Oblivion, Dragon Age, Two Worlds, Fallout 3, Skyrim,… Some apply scaling with more subtlety than others, but it is a rare case that it happens unnoticeably. The most extreme example is Oblivion, in which, paradoxically, the game was much easier to finish if you never bothered to level up at all.

Character development is a fundamental pillar of RPGs. If, by leveling your character, you are making fundamental changes to the way the world exists, then the game is cheating you.

The game world should be persistent (or at least indifferent to the level of the player). It’s reasonable to expect that:

• A rat will always be a rat with the same characteristics, and should live in the same places.
• If you to fight with a level 30 opponent when you are level one, you are asking to be destroyed.
• If an enemy defeats you, and you go back and try again at a later point in the game, that enemy should have the same abilities that it had the first time, and you should then be able to experience how your characters have progressed in level since the last meeting.

At its heart, auto-scaling is simply a very lazy way of letting the characters roam freely in a non-linear, open world environment. It would be very easy to implement this mechanic on Lords of Xulima; before each encounter selecting the enemies could trigger the leveling to match that of the player. But that is not what Lords of Xulima strives to be.

And in Lords of Xulima?

Lords of Xulima meets all three of the above criteria and has complex balancing:

• It is open world and non-linear: With the exception of the initial minutes of the game the player is welcome to go where he chooses. Of course, he won’t survive in many places as many regions will be to dangerous for low level characters, but there is no artificial boundary restricting movement.
• It is a Role Playing Game: With a complex system of character development, an 9 classes and more than 100 abilities that can be obtained and enhanced through leveling, there are thousands of different possibilities of character builds in every game.
• Is has turn-based, strategic combat so balance requires much more attention than if it were simply and action RPG.

In Lords of Xulima, the world is persistent and no enemy or treasure scales to match the level of the player. The world is divided into regions and those regions into areas. Each area has its own difficulty level, but even inside of that there can be many surprises (unique treasures, powerful enemies, special encounters…), because of this the player will want to stay alert.


There is a tendency today for games to be overly protective of the player and to be overly forgiving of the choices the player makes. Games are either linear, and leave no real decisions up to the player, or they’re open world in such a way that no matter what the player decides to do, the world bends to make that decision the right one. In reality, discovering which areas you are able to explore and learning which enemies are within your abilities to overcome (as well as finally defeating that enemy you once found impossible to combat) are what really make RPGs satisfying and fun.

 

[Roguey]

why is it important in a single player party based RPG that every single character be good at combat? that sounds boring actually

Every character should have a useful role to play during the core activity of any given game.

All my Icewind Dale characters were good in combat. I never took companions in BG2 or made a single character who would be bad in combat.

 

[Infinitron]

That article is about level scaling and the general issue of combat difficulty in a non-linear RPG, which has nothing to do with this conversation.

This article about balancing from the makers of Xulima is very good IMHO:

There is a tendency today for games to be overly protective of the player and to be overly forgiving of the choices the player makes.

He's talking about choices made during gameplay, not in character generation (which in Pillars of Eternity is defined as Not Gameplay).

 

[HiddenX]

Roguey
Every human specializes in a profession since the discovery of division of work and responsibilities in the stone ages.
Everyone can do everything is a communist pipe-dream that never succeeded.

Infinitron
I know.

But there are talking about balancing where balancing makes sense -> placing enemies, make areas of difficulty etc.


The sentence
There is a tendency today for games to be overly protective of the player and to be overly forgiving of the choices the player makes.
is nevertheless a good description for Josh's agenda "do whatever you like you will not fail".

 

[Infinitron]

is nevertheless a good description for Josh's agenda "do whatever you like you will not fail".

His agenda is more like "create whatever character you want, but you better know how to play it, or you will fail".

I'm not sure why so many people assume "Fighters with low strength aren't shit characters" also means "Your low strength fighter can can wade into melee combat naked and unarmed and win".

 

[Harold]

I see there's still a lot of anger in this thread, so I wrote a song to cheer you all up

Josh says balance is all that matters
And that powergamin's a sin
Drifting through a class system that's torn and tattered
Every point I put in a stat don't mean a thing

Don't stop, don't stop the balance
No more minmaxin', don't stop the balance

Josh says love for bad players is all that matters
Balance should be deeper than your skin
Lvlin' for the moment lame skills for all classes
Will I ever pathfind my way again

Don't stop, don't stop the balance
No more minmaxin', don't stop the balance

Don't stop, don't stop the balance

Josh says only soft-counters matter
Don't know why he won't give hard ones a try
Beetles in the dark come together
Got to keep on disengagin' or I'll die

Don't stop, don't stop the balance
No more minmaxin', don't stop the balance

Don't stop, don't stop the balance
No more minmaxin', don't stop the balance

Don't stop, don't stop the balance

 

[Infinitron]

(this should be a spell in the game)

 

[NotAGolfer]

The more I read about this the more I realize that I don't give a single fuck.
Just let him do his thing and see what's coming out of it. If only he wasn't so full of himself, that really annoys me.
Imo that Xulima article wasn't very convincing either. Figuring out what challenges you can overcome is what makes an RPG fun? Nigga please, I could list a dozen CRPGs (most of them are in the Codex top 50 list) where you never had to do that and could just follow the story and they were still very much fun. They make it sound like linear RPGs are shit, which is preposterous.
Nuff said, will get back to playing Chrono Trigger.
...
No, that's not a joke, I'm so tired of messed up, broken western open world CRPGs that I have to play some well-crafted wapanese RPG to get rid of the stench of inaptitude.
Also, I have to play something different than D:OS for a change.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

why is it important in a single player party based RPG that every single character be good at combat? that sounds boring actually

Every character should have a useful role to play during the core activity of any given game.

All my Icewind Dale characters were good in combat. I never took companions in BG2 or made a single character who would be bad in combat.

Why? I don't understand this need in a single player party based RPG... are your little digital bro's going to be butthurt? You as a player already have something to do all the time, you are managing your party as an entire entity, why the need for each part of that entity to do something all the time?

In war artillery does not having something to do all the time, yet it is a valuable and powerful factor when its time to shine occurs...If somebody designed a WW II game with the same philosophy as in PoE, it would lower the combined arms tactical component of combat synergy; it would essentially degrade total tactical choice-- and I think it does the exact same thing in a RPG. It homogenizes choice and results in order to achieve 'balance'; something that would only make sense to strive for in a game where each person were controlling an individual (and even then I think it is not the optimal design decision, I think it still degrades tactical interactions).

 

[Roguey]

Why? I don't understand this need in a single player party based RPG... are your little digital bro's going to be butthurt? You as a player already have something to do all the time, you are managing your party as an entire entity, why the need for each part of that entity to do something all the time?

In war artillery does not having something to do all the time, yet it is a valuable and powerful factor when its time to shine occurs...If somebody designed a WW II game with the same philosophy as in PoE, it would lower the combined arms tactical component of combat synergy; it would essentially degrade total tactical choice-- and I think it does the exact same thing in a RPG. It homogenizes choice and results in order to achieve 'balance'; something that would only make sense to strive for in a game where each person were controlling an individual (and even then I think it is not the optimal design decision, I think it still degrades tactical interactions).

I don't think you paid attention to

All my Icewind Dale characters were good in combat. I never took companions in BG2 or made a single character who would be bad in combat.

Did anyone ever take Cernd in BG2? The consensus is that he's a worthless character in every way. That's not anything to intentionally strive for.

 

[Harold]

Did anyone ever take Cernd in BG2? The consensus is that he's a worthless character in every way. That's not anything to intentionally strive for.

Yep. He's perfectly fine. STR/DEX/CON don't matter because they're overwritten by Werewolf shape anyway. Also, what consensus? The one of bad players who don't understand how to play a Shapeshifter? The actual problem was that druids in general were somewhat underpowered because Bio couldn't bother to properly translate them from P&P, but it's not as if vanilla BG2 is so difficult that you absolutely need a party of fully optimised characters.

 

[Cholo]

Andhaira would say that Cernd was one of his favorites: