I’m posting a couple of forum posts I made a few years back, talking about the concept of Balance in RPGs.

Balance… is tremendously important to any RPG. If you don’t think it is, then you don’t understand what balance is.

It doesn’t help the clarity of discussions that there are actually two types of balance with regard to playing RPG, both of which get confused for the other if the discussion isn’t precise enough or the idea isn’t understood well enough. To help everyone, here are the two types of balance we primarily talk about in RPGs:

CHARACTER vs CHARACTER BALANCE
This balance doesn’t concern itself with whether the fighter can defeat the mage in combat. It doesn’t care about that: what it cares about is whether the player of the fighter gets to engage in the game and enjoy themselves about the same amount as the player of the mage.

To consider an extreme example, imagine a game where a 1st level fighter was adventuring with a 30th level magic-user. Is this game going to be a good game for the fighter? It is very unlikely to be so, as everything that he can do, the magic-user can do better. (Heck, the fighter even has fewer HP and a worse chance of hitting with a sword!)

One of the interesting things about this form of balance is that the more the mechanics fade into the background, and the more role-playing and investigation come to the fore, the less important it is. If there’s only 10% of a session where dice are called for, and 90% where negotiation and problem-solving are needed, then the mechanical issues slip away.

Dungeons and Dragons in its older incarnations also had the concept of character v character balance being over the term of a campaign – fighters dominate early, then fade later, but all characters can always contribute (even if they’re not at the level they were earlier or will be in the future). The exploration element of the game also reduced somewhat the mechanical limitations of these editions.

CHARACTER VS SYSTEM BALANCE
This is the balance of the character against the challenges the DM throws at the players. Is this important? Well, there’s a reason that D&D modules have level ranges upon them!

Imagine a Call of Cthulhu adventure where the very first encounter is against Cthulhu itself. Everyone dies or goes insane. At this point, the players go home, the adventure over, wondering what that was about. The fact is, Call of Cthulhu is a narrative/roleplaying heavy game where survival of the characters is not the goal, but telling a good story is. Thus, putting the appearance of Cthulhu after four hours playing the game works for everyone for it comes at the end of the experience, providing closure to the session. Pacing is important! The first encounter? Ridiculous!

(Could you put Cthulhu at the beginning of an adventure, yes, you could… with the expectation that you next say, “and then…” to tell a story that requires the horrible death of the first group of characters. Such a tactic was used in Vecna Lives!, not one of the greatest AD&D adventures, but it does have its moments. However, could you do it every time? Hardly.)

The encounters in D&D have always had a rough balance against the characters. It’s not a perfect balance – in no edition is such suggested. Indeed, more recent editions specifically call out that some encounters should be “overwhelming” and should be avoided by characters that want to live. However, that balance between challenges and the characters has always been something to be considered, look to Gary Gygax decrying the Monty Haul campaign and the Killer campaign in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. One too easy, the other too difficult: AD&D was meant to set things right…

What D&D has as part of its genius is a pretty good set of devices to let the DM get an idea of how difficult an encounter will be for his characters. In AD&D, it was fairly primitive: a comparison of hit dice and special abilities against the level of the characters. In 3E and 4E, more sophisticated techniques – along with more complicated monsters – are used. The resulting calculation is not always accurate (especially in 3E against larger groups of monsters), but it is refined as it is understood better.

Where early 4E, in particular, has a problem is that the combats – balanced or otherwise – just take too long. It is a less swingy system than before: characters are intentionally designed to not go down in one hit, as was definitely the case in 3e. You’re meant to be able to seem doom approaching and have the option to flee. Unfortunately, the lethality was dialled back just a little too much, and combats moved towards overlong. (From my view of Essentials and the changes in monster design with MM3 and onwards, they’ve dialled up the lethality a notch: it’s still not “one shot kill”, but it’s definitely less safe).

However, even with the system helping you with character vs challenge balance issues, its still an area that is very amenable to DM adjustment. Indeed, it really requires it and this is the genius of the RPG compared to the computer game: the DM can adjust the game to make it more enjoyable as it is being played.

Is balance a mistake? By no means. It can be overdone, leading to a lack of variability in characters, encounters and experiences, but a good understanding of balance and its uses is, to my mind, a key factor in being not just a good DM, but a great DM.

BALANCING INDIVIDUAL ENCOUNTERS
In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins has to face Smaug the Dragon. This is a perfectly fine encounter for a RPG. However, it’s not placed there as a combat encounter – it’s a negotiating and ingenuity challenge. Can you get past without waking the dragon? If he is awake, what do you do then?

The funny thing is, one of my PCs once found himself in a similar situation. It was a 3E game, where my character a 6th level cleric, having gone the wrong way, had ended up face to face with a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. This is not a good position to end up in. Everyone thought I was dead. However, by the application of flattery, fast-talking, and more flattery I managed to impress the dragon (and, perhaps more importantly, the DM). Enough so that when I rolled a natural 20 on the Diplomacy check (and I was specialised in that skill as well), the dragon let me go and flew off to investigate the wonders I’d been talking about.

Looked at from a purely combat perspective, it was by no means balanced. That’s part of the problem of many adventures: they tend to look purely at combat. However, the balancing factor was that there was an alternative: you could sneak past it (which everyone else did), or talk you way out of it (which I did).

In The Forge of Fury, an early D&D 3E adventure, there’s an encounter with a Roper… a seriously tough monster, and far better than most parties at the level expected by the adventure. Why is it there? Because it can be negotiated with. And to teach the players that not everything can be defeated in combat.

However, these nominally “unbalanced” encounters exist within adventure structures where they’re optional. To reach the goal of the adventure, we didn’t need to meet the dragon nor overcome the roper. Balance becomes terribly important when you seek to understand adventure structure.

There are key encounters in adventures which must be overcome. One doesn’t wander into the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and negotiate the giants away from attacking the populace – you’ve got to fight them with magic and steel. Without an understanding of how the game is balanced, one doesn’t get a memorable fight. You could get a damp squib: a party of 10th level characters going up against giants with the stats of kobolds. Or it could be too far in the other way: giants far more dangerous than any party could take on. Does that lead to a memorable adventure? Probably not. It does lead to a short one… and probably one that the players walk away from if it keeps being repeated.

The sad thing about a lot of adventures is that every encounter has to be fought, and has to be overcome. Linear structure of adventures requires far more attention to balance, and it isn’t always a welcome one. Having situations that can’t be solved by combat is important for variety, I feel – and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

The point of this is to point out how adventure structure relies upon an understanding of the balance of the game. Why don’t you put Cthulhu first? Well, that’s because of adventure structure… and an understanding that, because of game balance, that the party just don’t breeze past!