I hate RPG game balance
Jul. 3rd, 2010 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxGame balance. One player has an uber edge, so the rules arbitrarily nobble that uber edge to give the other players a chance.
Go and look up Oscar Pistorius. He lost his legs, and had them fitted with prosthetic limbs. When pitted against regular Olympians he actually beat the world's fastest runners, but the Olynpic committee forced him back to the Paralympics. Yeah, way to keep the raspberries in the bloody ghetto, right?
We now know him as Blade Runner:-
A character like this in am RPG would probably be arbitrarily saddled with some stupid drawback like "loss of Essence" or "loss of Humanity" because of his bionics.
Does he look like he's lost any Essence or Humanity?
And just now, reading Signs & Portents Magazine number 82 (a Mongoose Publishing RPG mag), a section on augmetics and prosthetics in Traveller - bionics, IOW - says something like "Psionics and augments are very detrimental," dah dah dah yadda yadda yadda."
HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW?
What if they discovered that a character's high-tech cybernetic spinal rewiring, designed to allow him to function fully after an accident or exposure to some alien pathogen that had all but eaten away at his nervous system, actually acted as a potent psionic amplifier magnifying his natural psionic gifts a hundredfold and turning him into not only a physically powerful man, but also a devastating psychic and an accomplished warrior?
These drawbacks are arbitrarily written into the game rules to prevent all the characters from going "Oh, well if John's character can do that I'll just have my character jump into a thresher so I can get bionic legs like his."
Roleplaying has come up a hell of a long way from when it was all stat-driven, and games don't need to have stupid, irrelevant game-balancing rules woven in "just because it levels the playing field with the other characters." For Crom's sake, look at Babylon 5. You had Kosh Naranek, you had the Shadows, you had Lyta Alexander modified to be a psionic Doomsday weapon. But everybody seemed to get along happily even if they walked among Gods like Lorien, or the Soul Hunters with their strange alien technologies.
Vulcans in Star Trek are physically stronger, smarter, faster and tougher than humans - and yet the story is about the humans, not the Vulcans, who despite their superiority don't get to steal the show.
Once in a while, you get a Vulcan story like Amok Time - but it's about how humans deal with the alien culture the Vulcan characters take for granted. Again, you have fast, strong, tough Vulcans and feeble humans - but still the conflict is resolved satisfactorily without having to drag the Vulcans down.
Same deal for Klingons, Farscape's Luxans, whatever.
My point being, even if the character was all statted up the wazoo, with psionics, augments, enhancements, prosthetics and Ancient Artifacts enough to restock Warehouse 13 fifty times over, any competent Referee can still exercise game balance and focus the story on the other characters and their efforts to get through another day. They don't need some third party to do this job for them.
They never did.
Go and look up Oscar Pistorius. He lost his legs, and had them fitted with prosthetic limbs. When pitted against regular Olympians he actually beat the world's fastest runners, but the Olynpic committee forced him back to the Paralympics. Yeah, way to keep the raspberries in the bloody ghetto, right?
We now know him as Blade Runner:-
A character like this in am RPG would probably be arbitrarily saddled with some stupid drawback like "loss of Essence" or "loss of Humanity" because of his bionics.
Does he look like he's lost any Essence or Humanity?
And just now, reading Signs & Portents Magazine number 82 (a Mongoose Publishing RPG mag), a section on augmetics and prosthetics in Traveller - bionics, IOW - says something like "Psionics and augments are very detrimental," dah dah dah yadda yadda yadda."
HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW?
What if they discovered that a character's high-tech cybernetic spinal rewiring, designed to allow him to function fully after an accident or exposure to some alien pathogen that had all but eaten away at his nervous system, actually acted as a potent psionic amplifier magnifying his natural psionic gifts a hundredfold and turning him into not only a physically powerful man, but also a devastating psychic and an accomplished warrior?
These drawbacks are arbitrarily written into the game rules to prevent all the characters from going "Oh, well if John's character can do that I'll just have my character jump into a thresher so I can get bionic legs like his."
Roleplaying has come up a hell of a long way from when it was all stat-driven, and games don't need to have stupid, irrelevant game-balancing rules woven in "just because it levels the playing field with the other characters." For Crom's sake, look at Babylon 5. You had Kosh Naranek, you had the Shadows, you had Lyta Alexander modified to be a psionic Doomsday weapon. But everybody seemed to get along happily even if they walked among Gods like Lorien, or the Soul Hunters with their strange alien technologies.
Vulcans in Star Trek are physically stronger, smarter, faster and tougher than humans - and yet the story is about the humans, not the Vulcans, who despite their superiority don't get to steal the show.
Once in a while, you get a Vulcan story like Amok Time - but it's about how humans deal with the alien culture the Vulcan characters take for granted. Again, you have fast, strong, tough Vulcans and feeble humans - but still the conflict is resolved satisfactorily without having to drag the Vulcans down.
Same deal for Klingons, Farscape's Luxans, whatever.
My point being, even if the character was all statted up the wazoo, with psionics, augments, enhancements, prosthetics and Ancient Artifacts enough to restock Warehouse 13 fifty times over, any competent Referee can still exercise game balance and focus the story on the other characters and their efforts to get through another day. They don't need some third party to do this job for them.
They never did.
