A friend of mine used to compare game balance to literary fiction balance, where both Frodo and Gandalf are player characters and my friend asks "Would you really want to be Frodo?"Hamakto wrote:The only reason I am citing a little balance is the fact that if characters are too unbalanced it does ruin game play for some players (i.e. someone totally steals the show).
My answer at the time was "heck, no!" because in high school I was all about blowing things up and clearly Gandalf would be a lot more fun to play than Frodo. With age and experience I have encountered quite a few players who tell me that Frodo was an interesting character and they'd love to play Frodo given the choice. It really made me think about game balance and what it really means.
Game balance is tricky. A point-build system such as GURPS or Amber Diceless is balanced because everyone gets the same 100 points to build with, but only if the powers to pick from are correctly assigned points comparitive to their actual in-game value. A "roll 3d6 in order" system is theoretically balanced since everyone rolls the same dice with equal probabilities of rolling high or low, but when the dice hit the table usually someone gets a better character than someone else so perhaps its balance is more of an illusion than a reality.
My current thought is that game systems don't need to be totally balanced, but they shouldn't be totally unbalanced either. Each character option comes with advantages and disadvantages and as long as the two aren't too far apart the game works well. The thief shouldn't expect to use magic as well as the wizard or fight as well as the soldier, but the tradeoff is that he's better at sneaky stuff. If you equate inflicting damage with "balance" then the thief and fighter aren't a good match, but if you look at the total package hopefully both are worthy of fun play.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to stress that the concept of "balance" shouldn't be totally forgotten but it shouldn't restrict designers and force them to put dumb rules in just to make everyone "equal."
As always, just my two coppers.