Multi-Species Parties & Game Balance

[Atgxtg]

It sounds like an interesting and fun campaign. Probably much better than if the GM balanced off all the characters against each other. 

[Atgxtg]

. The Elf (regular, not gloranthan plant people) is equivalent to the human in almost all ways except where he has better stats; and I'm sure similar things would come up with some of the other intelligent races. In which case, what's the reason to play a human (I mean, yes you may still want to do it for flavor reasons, but you're doing so even though the options available heavily suggest mechanically that you should pick one of the more powerful options). I'd rather that the nonstandard races be appealing/available, but not because of mechanical superiority. I'd like playing a human to be an equally useful option to playing a troll (albeit a different option).

 

 

Well one reason would be the social advantages to playing a human. In most campaign setting humans are the dominant species and will have an easier time interacting with other humans. Considering how paranoid, bigoted and racist people from Medieval cultures typically were/are- even to other humans- the elf could find it annoying just to try and buy a beer.And the elf would probably be blamed for any misfortune that strikes while in the vicinity (or even afterwards).  

[Chaot]

 

So yeah; I'd like to either have a bunch of races that are closer in power to eachother such that I can pass my players a list of "pick one of these 12 races to play as" or a means of counterbalancing for more powerful races so I can give them a "tell me what you want to play as, and so long as it fits the setting, go nuts".

 

If I were going to even out the PC culture options I think what I would do is put a stat comparison together with Human as a base line.  I'd rate them in simple terms, looking specifically at how far outside the norm the other beings fall in comparison to humans.  Then I would adjust 'starting' skill points accordingly (and Fate points if that's something you want to include).  I wouldn't worry about coming up with complex skill advancement schemes because it's just one more thing you have to worry about at the table.

 

One thing that I feel would be good to throw out there in this discussion is the mp rule from Gods of Law.  It boils down to a PC can use mp as Fate points.  It nicely lets non magic using PCs find a sort of balance with PCs that do use magic.

[Atgxtg]

If I were going to even out the PC culture options I think what I would do is put a stat comparison together with Human as a base line.  I'd rate them in simple terms, looking specifically at how far outside the norm the other beings fall in comparison to humans.  Then I would adjust 'starting' skill points accordingly

Just what is "accordingly" though? 

Specifically, how many skill points offset a point of STR or DEX? I don't think there is an easy answer for that. I suppose we could reverse engineer the cost of stats and skills from the POWERS section, but I'm not convinced it would really balance out. 

[Chaot]

That's the crux of the biscuit.  I'd eyeball.  How many advantages does the one race have over the other?  How significant is each advantage, a little, middling, or significant?

 

Assign bonus points (or penalize points) accordingly.  20, 40 and 60 depending on advantage (I'd probably do 30, 60, 90 but I like high skill points).

[Darkholme]

Hmm.

 

I think I agree with Chaot here, at least, in theory.

 

I don't think different advancement rates are a good idea, and that includes the ones baked into the system (int bonus on skill improvement rolls, cha for extra skill improvement rolls). I think in the future I will either go with just handing out x% to the players to put where they want, handing out x d6%s to advance skills, or something else along those lines.

 

People keep bringing up "Well, there are social advantages to being human since humans run the world"–That is very rarely the case in games I play. I think that may be partly an age thing, but frequently humans make up 1/8 to 1/4 of the large cities. When not running "multicultural marvels of racial equality" I'm inclined to use other different races as the dominant race more often than humans. Odds are the dominant race (if it exists) is likely to change from one campaign to the next (and in our groups, a campaign generally lasts somewhere from 4-10 months). So if this campaign is human dominant, I likely won't run another human dominant one for several years. Maybe I'll do one that's elf-dominant, with humans as a primitive minority group (or perhaps a more numerous but less powerful group). Or one that's got different empires ruled by different species, where humans have one empire out of like, 12. Or perhaps a world ruled by devils, or extraplanar beings of law and chaos. Why would I want to go with the same world premise every time?

 

Without that social advantages you describe, humans kind of suck.

 

So I'd like to be able to measure the things, such that I can have comparable-powered races in my games, and such that I an introduce new or different races as needed, for different campaigns.

 

As for how to balance different races for when playing in a setting where a multi-species party isn't a travelling freakshow where the majority of the world favors the crappies race, I think in the end the best approach would involve some kind of point-buy system with prices which based on math and educated-guesswork. A point-buy system which is iterative in design–by which I mean that it's not a publish and you're done thing, but instead done as an ongoing playtest until balance problems stop cropping up. I think a friend of mine might still have a rough spreadsheet we worked on to do something like this for a RQ6 game he ran a couple years back, shortly after it was released. I'll ask him.

[fmitchell]

... I think in the end the best approach would involve some kind of point-buy system with prices which based on math and educated-guesswork. A point-buy system which is iterative in design–by which I mean that it's not a publish and you're done thing, but instead done as an ongoing playtest until balance problems stop cropping up. I think a friend of mine might still have a rough spreadsheet we worked on to do something like this for a RQ6 game he ran a couple years back, shortly after it was released. I'll ask him.

 

After years of playing GURPS, I find the lack of point-buy or advantages/disadvantages in BRP quite refreshing.  Which isn't to say it's a bad idea, but one can take it too far.  I'd recommend borrowing from elsewhere:

• Mini Six has a very coarse-grained advantage/disadvantage system, which is what I would prefer.

   

• In a system with Fate Points, Hero Points, or the like the Mutants & Masterminds 3e approach, in which disadvantages earn Fate Points when they come into play works far better than the "free" character points provided in GURPS, Unisystem, or HERO.  Note that all three restrict the number of points earned through disadvantages, and GURPS has an oft-ignored adage that a disadvantage that isn't actually a disadvantage should be worth no points.)

   

• In Airship Pirates disadvantages provide "free points" depending on how many you take: 5 for one disad, 3 for the next, 2 for the third, and nothing for further disadvantages.

   

• Savage Worlds and Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space divide Edges and Flaws into Major and Minor, with two Minor equivalent(?) to one Major, and limits on both Edges and Flaws one can take.

   

• Barbarians of Lemuria matches Boons and Flaws one-to-one. The expansion Barbarians of the Aftermath, in order to represent mutants, aliens, and supernatural beings, defines some Boons worth 2 or 3 Flaws and vice versa, plus random mutations.

What I would definitely not use is a spreadsheet or computer program to work out each species ... or, Malkion help us, each character.  Been there, done that, bought the hair shirt.  If anything, I'd like to see some sort of adaptive self-balancing system where special (dis)abilities cost (or yield benefits) based exclusively on how often they come into play.  Short of borrowing Aspects and its Fate Point economy wholesale, I don't know what that would look like.

[Darkholme]

Ah. I think you misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting point buy for characters.

 

I'm suggesting a point-buy system used solely for designing new races, such that the attributes and/or special abilities a race has can be meaningfully weighed and measured and compared, and the available/common player races in your campaign or setting can be tailored to a specific power level. Frequency of abilities/weaknesses should be taken into consideration just as much as power should be.

 

Basically, a tool for the GM to use when he has new parts he wants/needs for his setting.

 

As for how to handle/compensate for disparities between existing races, that's a different can of worms entirely. Bonus starting skills could be one approach (as mentioned above), or you could look into some other options.

[MatteoN]

I don't think different advancement rates are a good idea

 

So it's become a bad idea in a couple of pages. May I ask why?

[Darkholme]

So it's become a bad idea in a couple of pages. May I ask why?

Well. I've been thinking of some other cases of different rates of advancement, and I dont think I've ever seen it work out well.

 

The guys advancing slower eventually fall behind and never catch up.

 

If they start out ahead, it starts out in their favor, and eventually tips against them forever. If the goal is to achieve parity, they'd need a really steep penalty for the other players to catch up quickly, then that penalty would have to be removed. I think it would be very tricky.

 

Ideally, the goal is to measure their power level from the start, so that if they're more powerful, you can advance the other characters until it evens out before the game starts, and then just continue as usual.

 

I asked my friend, unfortunately he no longer has the spreadsheets we worked on (and I misremembered; they were for Legend, but it was around the time RQ6 came out).

[Atgxtg]

I think if you want parity, the only way you'll get is is to balance out the characters at the start and then give out the same amount of experience as rewards throughout the campaign. This isn't an unheard of approach. Both FATE and AMBER used such a system. 

 

But I really think letting people roll for advancement but then arbitrarily capping them is kjust going to cause player frustration and resentment. Why bother to roll if the advancement really isn't going to be random. It would be like running a race where you stop the leaders every lap and wait for the rest of the cars to catch up before running the next lap.

[Darkholme]

I think if you want parity, the only way you'll get is is to balance out the characters at the start and then give out the same amount of experience as rewards throughout the campaign. This isn't an unheard of approach. Both FATE and AMBER used such a system.

Yep. I think I said this same thing last page. I concur.

 

You may be right. I think allowing it to be treated like a race (zoom, not as in racism) is also not a good idea. I think I will just hand out x% or x% in dice, as well as x% for reallocating things; and notify the players at the beginning what the final power cap will be (total and per-skill) and that once that final cap has been met, they will only continue to receive the x% for reallocating things. Perhaps skill points over 100 will take multiple points each to make up for the fact that you aren't rolling and risking failure anymore to increase them beyond 100. That's fine though.

 

Which means I will need to only allow races that I've pre-balanced out at character creation, and that I will have to come up with a way to balance them before presenting them to the players for character creation (unless they all are playing the same race).

[soltakss]

The problem with giving extra skills to "disadvantaged" races is that it breaks down when you compare more than a few races.

 

At extremes, let us consider a giant and a halfling.

 

Giants have 3D6+6 STR and SIZ per 2m growth, so a reasonable giant, say 8m, has 12D6+24 STR and SIZ, so has 132 points (12x3.5+24, for each) in a points-build, just for those, adding in an average of 10 for the other characteristics, we get 182 points. A halfling comes out to a lot, lot less. So, do we up a halfling's skills to compensate for the giant's high points? What about humans, trolls, dwarves? They all have meagre points compared to the giant, so should they get a bonus too?

 

You could argue that a giant is unreasonable, but RQ/Legend/BRP has always had the concept that any race is a playable one.

 

Where do you draw the line? What is the baseline where you start from? Ig humans are the base, then anything higher does not get an advantage, but anything lower does. However, what about traits? A pixie who can fly and turn invisible has two extra benefits that a human does not. Surely, that disadvantages humans. Trolls get Night sight, Elves get Earth Sense, mermen can swim very well. How are they factored in?

 

If you want to balance races, then you cannot just take into account characteristics.

 

The whole process becomes incredibly cumbersome and becomes an exercise in book-keeping, rather than a quick way of statting up a PC.

[Darkholme]

The problem with giving extra skills to "disadvantaged" races is that it breaks down when you compare more than a few races.

 

At extremes, let us consider a giant and a halfling.

I don't think anything would need to break down with "more than a few races". But you're welcome to disagree. I would argue that the Giant and Halfling would not probably not exist in the same party, but sure. for argument's sake, lets say you as a GM allow it.

 

Obviously you cannot just look at characteristics. I (or whomever), in assembling such a balancing mechanism, would need to weigh everything, including all manner of special abilities such as flight, or having more hit locations (if we're playing with hit locations) etc, as accurately as I could. Correct. I thought that was a given.

 

Where is the cumbersome exercise in book-keeping coming from? I could see it if you were arguing about trying to save some time for the GM, when he is making up new races - but I would say he should take the time to do it right rather than just slap some numbers on a page without giving it much thought. For the player himself? Well, if the GM has given no indication what the available power range of available races is, and the player shows up with a dragon without consulting the GM, sure, nobody is going to expect that. But really, I would expect if I show up with a Dragon as a starting PC in most RuneQuest games, without consulting the GM first, I will be told: "No. Make Another Character".

 

As a player, the way it would work, is the GM would give me a list of acceptable races (or the most powerful race he is allowing). Each race would have a point-cost which I would have visible/available to me when building my character. For bookkeeping, If I did not choose that most-powerful option, the difference between the race I chose and the maximum powered race allowed gives me what my extra stuff budget is at character creation. Then I would simply spend those on whatever I wanted at the costs they are assigned, and I'm done.

 

So the bookkeeping would consist of subtracting one number from another, and then allocating some additional points. Thats not that much bookkeeping at all. It adds like, 2 extra steps to character creation. Hardly "incredibly cumbersome".

 

If I want to use a race/creature whose point total has not been calculated, then yes, someone would have to calculate that first; which would be an extra step. Punch some numbers into a calculator, possibly some pencil scratch notes on paper. But I don't see any reason the more common options couldn't be pre-calculated in the document, or why the GM couldn't take the time to calculate the point totals of the races he is allowing. I know I would be fine with providing the stats and numbers for whatever aces I intend to allow players to play as in a campaign.

 

Is it as simple as telling the players "Only Humans" or "Any monster you like in the compendium, regardless of player power differences?" obviously not. If you don't care about such power differences, or if you want everyone to play the same species, this system wouldn't really benefit you. If instead, you actually want to have multiple options without any of them just being "better" and making those players much more likely to outshine players who took other options, well - currently there is no real option for that in any d100 variation, so you're SOL. - This is the GM that such a system would be useful to. Particularly if you are the kind of guy who wants to allow say, some or all of the basic 7 D&D races, and/or use a bunch of custom homebrewed races made up for your setting, and want none of them to be objectively worse.

[Atgxtg]

 

Yes. If you're going to allow Halflings and Humans in the same party as Giants, it would make sense to compensate them for the power disparity by allowing the "lesser races" to start out as more skilled characters, or give them legendary abilities, or stunts, or whatever. If you're not allowing/including something as powerful as giants and as weak as halflings in the options the playes can choose, that disparity will be much smaller.

 

 

Why would it make sense to compensate? That defeat the whole point of playing a giant in the first place? If you balance it all off them it really doesn't matter what people are playing. And if you balance off advancement, it doesn't really matter much how they play either. 

[MatteoN]

These things are much easier to handle in GURPS. For example, a non-violent, wheelchair-bound giant would be a perfectly viable character.

[el_octogono]

Why would it make sense to compensate? That defeat the whole point of playing a giant in the first place? If you balance it all off them it really doesn't matter what people are playing. And if you balance off advancement, it doesn't really matter much how they play either. 

Exactly, it would be better to use a system like HeroQuest and make character differences a matter of colour.

 

 

 

By doing this you could end in play with another balance problem. Lesser races will have broader and better capabilities in doing stuff than the giant who probaby would have to wait for a combat or fisical feat. In the end it is all a matter of percieved balance rather than real statistic equilibrium. We are also taking for granted that being giant is always an advantage but in many story situations it is a huge drawback: unable to enter some place, unable to hide from the orcish horde, being an easy target from below and from the castle walls archers, looting useless weapons and armor, and many other situations.

[Darkholme]

These things are much easier to handle in GURPS. For example, a non-violent, wheelchair-bound giant would be a perfectly viable character.

Depending on the subject and theme of your game, I suppose that could work. I think I would find that to be a dull story to play in.

 

I would rather those character differences be a matter of flavor, than color. Meaningful mechanical differences are good.

 

 

I don't think I would take for granted the differences that go with being overly large. as I said, you would have to adequately measure all of the factors. Not fitting into buildings and whatnot? that is a factor, just like all the others.

And yes, perceived balance is (in this case) more important than real statistical equilibrium. However, being closer to statistical equilibrium can tend to make that much easier to achieve.

 

But, seriously, you're going with: "If you would think a houserule would improve your home games in this system, screw off and go play a different gamesystem"? Even if there are parts I would like better if done differently, I like the d100 system as a whole and would like to run games with it, otherwise I wouldn't want to use it at all. Though that seems like an obvious thing. This system already has all kinds of optional mechanics for different purposes and tastes, some of which are partial or full replacements rather than additions. Why would it be so awful to have one more?

[el_octogono]

What I'm trying to say is that you have to be aware of the mmm ramifications or unexpected situations when trying to balance a power or feat and X% skill and X points of charasteristics, and if it is worth the effort. Clever players will find holes or combinations that may give advantage over the other players. GURPS for example, suffers from this. It happened to me that some of the other players felt cheated and wanted to change their pcs. I am not trying to persuade you, just sharing my experience and view on the matter.

[seneschal]

These things are much easier to handle in GURPS. For example, a non-violent, wheelchair-bound giant would be a perfectly viable character.

Hero System could handle it, too (sans wheelchair).   All Fantasy Hero characters would start with 75 or 100 build points plus Disadvantages, regardless of race, and would gain experience points according to the quality of their role-playing as judged by the GM.  The game balance thing, like SIZ, is a quirk of BRP.

 

Giant + halfling?  It's the Nero Wolfe setup.  Harried hobbit investigates in town, then has the guard and suspects gather in the giant's drawing room for the amazing armchair resolution.  (What?  You expected a dumb giant?  Talk about stereotypes!)

[MatteoN]

Of course I was just ironizing on GURPS' balance-through-disadvantages, but forgot to include a smile in my post! 

[Darkholme]

Of course I was just ironizing on GURPS' balance-through-disadvantages, but forgot to include a smile in my post! 

Ah. I missed the Irony.

 

Sure, there will basically always be that potential, of some corner-case you had not considered which ends up more powerful and can lead to disgruntled players. Presently, in d100, there isn't anything in place to minimize that at all. I get that some of you guys are cool with that. Either it doesn't matter because you run groups of all humans, or because you're cool with one player having a character who is just better at everything,  or you're not concerned about it because your setting hates on nonhumans and you think that will offset the power discrepancy. That doesn't cover what everyone is looking for in a game though.

 

I do get that it takes time and effort to pull off such a thing, and it may take a few versions to iron out the corner cases that pop up, or to account for things that are under or over-priced. That's fine.

 

I've actually been considering looking into Fantasy Hero as a system for use in Urban Fantasy games, based on other people's praise. I have not played the HERO system before, however. Aside from time-consuming but flexible character creation, how is HERO?

[MatteoN]

I've actually been considering looking into Fantasy Hero as a system for use in Urban Fantasy games, based on other people's praise. I have not played the HERO system before, however. Aside from time-consuming but flexible character creation, how is HERO?

 

I liked playing it very much! I'm not very knowledgeable about HERO, but except for the bit I found annoying (variable bonuses for stats) I'd say it's a great system. It has the best damage location system imho.

[Darkholme]

I liked playing it very much! I'm not very knowledgeable about HERO, but except for the bit I found annoying (variable bonuses for stats) I'd say it's a great system. It has the best damage location system imho.

Yeah?

 

Hmm. Well I will definitely need to check it out then.

[Atgxtg]

 

Why should the other players be forced to play as your ineffective pets or sidekicks? Unless you're suggesting you get permission from all of the other players before the game starts, with the understanding that you want to just be better, then fine. I know I would object to that. Playing as "those three dudes who hang around with a giant" doesn't sound fun at all. I want to also get to do fun things, and if being a Giant makes you just better than everyone else, then the only way I would enjoy playing in a game with a giant is to also be a giant.

 

If you balance them, people end up being good at different things, but everyone has the potential to be equally awesome.

 

If poeple are being ineffective, it's more of a player problem than a character one. 

 

 

If you balance them then nobody gets to be awesome. That's the D&D pitfall. Everything is supposedly balanced so no one and nothing actually stands out. Everyone had the same opportunities, they just chose differently. 

 

Juding from your posts and point of view, why do you want to run BRP or Legend? Why not go with one of the pre-balanced RPGs? They would appear to be more your style.