Why is balance more important to you than fun? The real world

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Well
I know that my interest in balance is to help protect my ability to be relevant.

If I'm using a system where half the game is figuring out the "optimal" and "trap" options, then I know I'm going to be punished in-game if I don't choose wisely. And by choosing wisely, I mean I'll probably have to discard or modify a character concept to stay relevant.

I like being "original" and everything but I hate when characters' achievements are overshadowed by turbo-specialists who could play the campaign themselves and are basically setting the difficulty.

>>49234813
I play RPGs to get away from the fact that I'm a mediocre nobody IRL.

>>49235419
>I know that my interest in balance is to help protect my ability to be relevant.
This. If a character is not as relevant as another character, the irrelevant character's player will not have fun. A well balanced system contributes to a fun game.

Balance is relative.

I find Balance between casters/non-casters in D&D-like games to be the most contentious issue.

I like high lethality classless systems - Rune Quest is my jam - The ceiling for instant-kill potential is pretty low, at least with most humanoid enemies, as HP growth is sparing and conditional on actually increasing your con and siz stats during gameplay, which aren't givens.

This means that a Sorcerer trying to pulverise you with a giant glowing magical fist is just as likely to mangle you you as a tribal warrior swinging a great-axe with a bladesharp 4 cult magic spell on it.

Everybody can use magic in Rune Quest - of course specialists are better at it, and it's straight bullshit, because many of the utility spells are of broad generalized use - like stabilize/destabilize masonry, Conjure a fire of a set size and the like as well as traditional direct attack type spells.

Everybody gets a slice of the bullshit though through cult affiliations, runes acquired, shamanism, petty or folk magic or sorcery, no character has any reason to be deprived of enhancement spells common to warriors or muffling effects used by thieves; because the default setting; Glorantha, is highly magical in nature, and even an older child might know a firewood chopping enhancement or some strange trick like a "sneaking song" - that inexplicably makes you harder to find while you sing it.

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>>49234813
Balance is there because giving your players a good story means giving them challenges that will neither be too easy or impossible. Balance needs to exist to accurately guage what you're throwing at players, and player characters themselves need to be balanced against eachother otherwise you run the risk of one or two players doing everything while the others feel useless.

But you already knew this, OP, this entire topic was bait, wasn't it?

2/10 got me to reply.

balance isnt always leading to fun

but an amount of balance is neccessary to have fun

if given a choice between A,B,C and A is much more powerful than either B or C, then everyone would choose A and the game would stagnate, limiting choices inst usually fun

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>>49234813
>Why is balance more important to you than fun?
Because the two aren't mutually exclusive but to a certain degree balance is a prerequisite to fun. 3.5e is the best example of a horribly balanced game. It's intended to have different classes with various strengths and weaknesses cooperate. The 'standard' party is a fighter, a rogue, a cleric and a wizard. If the cleric and the wizard are played halfway intelligently (that doesn't mean using obscure splatbook supplements, feats and spells. It simply means the cleric not casting only heals and debuffs and the wizard not only casting blasty spells) the two of them could replace the entire party. Hell, even the wizard and (especially) the cleric alone could make both the fighter and the rogue feel superfluous.

Now tell me, what's the fun in being useless?
>B-But le roleplay
The classes were designed to appeal to the rules, not roleplay. If I wanted to roleplay without actually participating in the game I'd play a nobleman who travels with the party, or maybe some magical kind of furry creature that spends most of his time sitting on the wizard's shoulder and shouting snide comments to the enemy, questioning their parentage and sexual orientation.

>>49234813
I think balance is about choice. When a player has a concept character they want to flesh out in a system, I never want to have to say "that fits the bill, but its not very good." They wont have as much fun, and may drop the concept that they were so excited about.

A good balanced system gives people options to make the character they want to play, not the character that they can efficiently play without being totally outshone or annihilated.

>>49234813
>Why is balance more important to you than fun?
Balance is there to help ensure fun. It's not fun if your character isn't able to impact the world or the story, when you're stuck sitting in the back row with nothing meaningful to contribute.

If you want to deliberately make your character like that, that's one thing, there can be fun in playing the sidekick... but that needs to be a specific choice that you make, not something that the system forces on you because you dared to choose options that fit your theme but are underpowered compared to other options.

>>49234813
>The real world isn't balanced - you don't go for the investment banker class that is wildly broken in this patch because it's broken, you go for the RPG player because that's what you can get with the background and stats you rolled..
Tell me, is working your ass off for a pittance compared to working half your ass off then rolling in money fun?

That should answer your questions about why imbalance in real life is not fun and why when playing we would want things more balanced.

>>49234813
Because I have fun when my class isn't worth a single feature to another, and I don't have fun when other people at the table feel useless.

>>49237570
TIL Clerics and Wizards can cast infinite amount per day from an infinite list they don't need to prepare in advance.

Seriously unless you ignore the limits already built into all caster classes there's no real issue with them beyond what people who probably don't even play the game invent on the internet to complain about.

>>49238463
Wizards? Which edition are you playing? Because I'm pretty sure in 5e only Clerics can do that, and it's kinda supposed to represent that they can pray to their gods for anything really, not really something that takes "preparation"... and it's still not infinite times per day.

>>49238491
Cast "Detect Sarcasm"

>>49234813
Mate, you answered your own question. We'd all prefer to play the Investment Banker class, because the Investment Banker class is a lot more fun. But we rolled shitty stats and a shitty background, so we're stuck with the RPG player background and are having a lot less fun than that smug fuck who rolled the Trust Fund Baby background.

>>49238491
He's just bitching and cunting about the problems that people have with 3.PF, trying to claim that the Tier 1's aren't actually overwhelmingly good, it's just all your fault for not doing it right somehow. Like a monk is actually a good class will be his next claim, and you just need to get good.

>>49238491
Exactly. My point is that the classes have several ways built in that balance them hence the whole OP casters weak martials meme is bullshit. A Rogue can open infinite locks and disable infinite traps per day , a wizard cannot and loses out of other options if they choose to as well.

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>>49238463
The problem with Wizards is that an extremely small amount of spells can still make them more versatile than many other characters in some editions of the game (mainly 3.5/Pathfinder). For example, Vanish, a level 1 spell, can turn a wizard into a better stealth character than a rogue who has a bunch of points invested in Sneak.

>>49238463
My experience is that the caster's number of spells eventually comes to outstrip the player's endurance for continued play. Nevermind the question of how you're selectively depleting the wizard's resources and not those of the other party members.

>>49238463
You're not taking out actual threats without spells.

Aaand it's another 3.5 casters vs martials thread again.

>>49238581
My experience is that half the time players either intentionally or unintentionally don;t keep track of their spell slots and just bullshit everything, because it's alot of pain-in-the-ass book-keeping, especially in 3.5 where intelligence adds modifiers to your spell slots and stuff.

Also this >>49238564, Caster's problem was never how good they were in combat, it was that they could do anything and everything with the right amount of spells. Strong fighterman, sneaky fighterman, and charismatic fighterman are all seperate classes. A caster can be all three at once relatively easily, even when they're not cheating the system somehow.

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>>49238463
The Fighter will run out of hp before the wizard or cleric runs out of spells, especially at later levels. And this is especially the case for the cleric, who needs to burn his own spell slots to keep the fighter alive.

>Muh preparation tho
Many of the most preferred spells are incredibly versatile. The more obscure spells are almost exclusively used for situations you can see coming (passing through an incredibly cold region, preparing for diplomacy etc.). The only solution against this would be something like "three diplomats jump out of a bush and demand you start negotiating a peace treaty", and even then the wizard might be useless but the fighter less than useless. And then there's wands for the spells wizards and clerics absolutely, positively need at any given point, such as cure light wounds or perhaps some non-attribute dependent buffs. Meanwhile there's no item that will make a fighter proficient at anything other than fighting. Even an item of +6 diplomacy will make him worse than the cleric or the wizard, especially given the fact that Cha is one of the few stats a fighter can afford to outright dump. And let's not forget that diplomacy is a cross-class skill.

>>49238564
Let's not forget the worst thing about 3.5e: one of the monk's capstones is the ability to fall from any height without sustaining any damage... as long as they're parallel to a wall or other steep surface. This capstone is objectively worse than the level 1 feather fall spell.

>>49238620
And wizards get scribe scroll for free as a feat. So they can make that shit cheap.

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>>49238564
>>49238610
>>49238620

>Not house-ruling that wizards can't learn any spells above level 1 except in their specialty school (or something that fits their bloodline theme as a sorcerer).

This literally solves 80% of the problems of caster being super overpowered.
The remaining 20% still makes them better than non-magical characters in most situations that AREN'T combat though...

>>49234813
Imbalance often destroys fun. I won't say balance is inherently fun, because it isn't, but forcing players to choose between abandoning their character's entire concept or being made totally irrelevant by powergamers isn't a recipe for a good time.

And the real world comparison doesn't work at all, because the real isn't fun for the most part.

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>>49238632
True, though it also costs them some xp. Never bothered with it so I'm not sure if it's worth the effort or not.

>>49238664
>This literally solves 80% of the problems of caster being super overpowered.
That's why it's my favorite 3.5e supplement. It's usually unfavorably compared to anime, but that's exactly what makes it great. It allows you to be H-HAYAI (the various multi-attack/dodge manouvres), it allows you to overcome great odds through sheer willpower (iron heart surge) and it allows you to rely on your Nakama and the power of friendship (white raven school).

Weeb fighters are the best fighters, prove me wrong.

>>49238715
Trival amounts that you'll make up on the adventure. And having a few extra scrolls is always better then not dying.

And scrolls keep forever, so even if you don't use'm, they're still there for later.

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the fuck's a balance?

>>49238715
3.5's XP system is so retarded that by RAW it's possible to end up ahead of everyone else in your party by exploiting crafting costs and the fact that lower ECL characters gain more XP than higher ones do.

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>>49238824
>Using XP
>Not just giving the party level-ups at the end of quests/important plot arcs

>>49238715
I uh.... need a sauce on that. If you can, it's not a big deal

>>49238715
I don't remember this episode. Is there an OVA or something?

>>49239010
Netoge.

Four people form a small guild on an MMO and become friends, with two of them even getting married in-game.

They then discover that they all go to the same school, and the girl who got married is a mentally unbalanced game addict who considers them married in reality.

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>>49239072
>They then discover that they all go to the same school, and the girl who got married is perfect
FTFY

>>49239032
Around episode 8 or 9 I think? It's one of the episodes where they're training to win the Guild War

>>49234813
Because it's more fun, when it's balanced?

>>49234813
>implying the real world is fun
It's not about system balance. It's about inner party balance. At least, when it comes to meaningful contribution to defeating the scenario.