Josh Sawyer Explains: How to Balance an RPG - Extensive Editorial at Kotaku

[Infinitron]

http://kotaku.com/how-to-balance-an-rpg-1625516832
 
Excerpt:
 
Why is game balance important in a single-player game?
 
It's a question many players often ask rhetorically, but there are many important reasons why balance should be a strong focus, even in RPGs that focus on single-player experiences. Balance isn't necessarily about seeing what character builds are more powerful when put head to head, but about understanding the different types of challenges those characters will face when going through the game.
 
Ideally, each type of character build has its own strengths and weaknesses throughout the game's content, but ultimately ALL character builds should feel viable in different ways. No player wants to spend 40 hours working toward a dead-end build. Similarly, few players want to accidentally discover that their fundamental character concept is an unspoken "easy mode" through the game. 
 
RPGs, especially the RPGs we make at Obsidian, are about choice and consequence. That doesn't just apply to the narrative elements, but also gameplay: character creation, character building, and tactical application of skills and abilities in the wild. If we do our jobs well, players will feel the sting of character weaknesses and the satisfaction of character strengths over the course of the game. Challenge is a tricky thing to balance for a wide range of players, but ideally it builds by giving players short periods of stress and mild frustration caused by a mental obstacle. Players examine the obstacle, consider their options, make choices, and eventually overcome it, transforming stress into a sense of exhilaration at their own ingenuity.
 
But where does this process all start? For me, it begins with a common question I have with anything involving player choice.
 
What Sort of Decisions Do We Want the Player to Make?
 
By this I mean not only the choices players must make at an obvious level—Strength vs. Charisma, fighter vs. rogue, sword vs. axe—but also, the criteria that drive those decisions. These criteria could be as broad as deciding between a character class that does a lot of damage in combat vs. a class that is great at navigating conversations. Or, they could be as narrow as emphasizing attack speed over damage done on a Critical Hit. 
 
There are two levels at which players generally make these sorts of decisions. The first is aesthetic and conceptual: "Wizards are cool." "Clubs are boring." "Being strong owns." 
 
The second is mechanical/rational: "High damage is important." "Gotta have a healer." "Debuff effects can make a huge difference in fights."
 
Different players balance these desires differently, but ideally an aesthetic choice will always map to a viable build, and a viable build will map to something players will find cool for their character. When this doesn't happen, it can result in a lot of annoyance from players. They are either forced to play something they conceptually like that is mechanically bad or they have to veer away from their character concept to be mechanically viable. In an RPG, this is undesirable — so say I, at least. That's why this initial stage should only end after you've soberly asked yourself important questions about why players would want to pick any given option you're presenting them.
 
Take Out The Trash
 
"Trash" or "trap" options are a time-honored tradition in RPGs, both tabletop and computer. Trash options are choices that are intentionally designed to be bad, or that don't get enough attention during development and testing to actually be viable in the game.
 
It is now 2014 and, friends, I am here to tell you that trash options are bull****. 
 
In a computer RPG, any trash option that goes from designer's brain to the shipped product has probably gone through a few dozen cycles of implementation, testing, and revision. In the end, the trash option is the proverbial polished turd. Any seasoned RPG veteran that looks at it in detail realizes it's terrible and avoids it. Those who don't look closely or who aren't system masters may wind up picking it for their character under the mistaken impression that it's a viable choice. In any case, it's a bad option that the team spent a bunch of time implementing either for misguided schadenfreude or simple lack of attention.
 
While big RPGs always let a few of these trash options slip through unintentionally, the best way to avoid the problem on a large scale is simply to ask why well-informed players, acting with eyes wide open, would want to pick any given option over a different option in the first place. There should be a good conceptual/aesthetic reason as well as a good mechanical reason. If one of those falls short, keep hammering away until you feel you've justified their existence. Sometimes, it's not possible. In those cases, at least you've had the good fortune to realize you're stuck with trash early in development — whether it doesn't fit aesthetically or doesn't work mechanically — and can justly dump it before more effort goes into it.
 
As an example from Pillars of Eternity, we have maces and padded armor, two things that generally get short shrift in a lot of RPGs. In most RPGs, maces are slow and do poor damage with few elements in the "+" column. In Pillars of Eternity, they don't do any less damage than other one-handed weapons and they have the advantage of negating a portion of the armor on the target. Swords can do a variety of damage types, spears are inherently accurate, and battle axes do high Crit damage, but maces are a viable mechanical choice among their peers.
 
Padded armor suffers even worse in most RPGs: in many games, there are literally no worse options than padded. The suits are often aesthetically ugly and mechanically awful—the quintessence of a pure RPG trash option—and if players are forced to wear padded armor at the game's opening, they'll gladly ditch it as soon as anything else becomes available. In Pillars of Eternity, padded armor actually offers reasonably good protection. It can easily be argued that our padded armor is more protective than is realistic, but the first goal is not verisimilitude, but justifying the player's interest. 
 
And, while heavier armor absorbs more damage, the heavier a suit of armor is in Pillars of Eternity, the longer it takes a character to recover from making an attack or casting a spell. A character in mail armor can absorb more damage than a character in padded, but the character in padded armor will perform more actions over a given period of time.
 
This fundamental tradeoff is both easy to grasp ("take less damage vs. do things faster") and has universal implications for all characters. All characters perform actions, and performing actions more quickly is always better. All characters also need to be protected from damage. A tradeoff like damage reduction vs. movement speed would have dramatically different implications for a melee-oriented barbarian than a long-range wizard. 
 
We also intentionally avoided the classic RPG armor tradeoff of damage avoidance (i.e. dodging) vs. straight damage reduction. While it's easy to grasp conceptually, it's mechanically uninteresting and unengaging unless you get into spreadsheet-level minutiae of how the damage reduction curves play out over time. Spreadsheet gaming can be enjoyable on its own, but there should be a more obvious tradeoff that the player can directly observe in-game for the choice to feel meaningful.
 
...

All These Feels

 

The most important high-level goal with any choice the player makes is that they feel good. This is an abstract concept, but it's important to understand that games come down to a series of experiences for the player. The reason we tweak or adjust anything isn't simply to achieve a mythic "perfect balance" as a goal in its own right, but to make something balanced enough that the player's experience with that content is satisfying. There are myriad aesthetic and mechanical elements that feed into the player's perception of the options that are available to them. We want players to feel that their choices fit their character concept and are ultimately up to the challenge — without making the challenge irrelevant.

Edited August 22, 2014 by Infinitron

[Marceror]

Nice. That was just an "excerpt"?

[Amentep]

Yeah the full article is longer. And interesting reading.

[Malekith]

:gets popcorn;

Edited August 22, 2014 by Malekith

[PrimeHydra]

Awesome article--thanks for the link!

[Tsuga C]

Hey, who deleted my post? 

[prodigydancer]

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting? If there are no bad builds what stops player from clicking through chargen screens with their eyes closed picking things at random? If there's no bad gear how can there be good or great gear?

 

Things are good and bad only in comparison with each other. Padded armor may be weak but it lets other armor types shine. Especially if it's very common and dirt cheap. Conversely, full plate tends to be rare, valuable and highly sought after precisely because it provides superior protection. If padded and plate are effectively equal due to trade-offs, why seek either? You can just use whatever drops first till the end of the game (or till the next tier of gear becomes available).

 

Even the possibility of making a mistake (like spending skill points on a seemingly useless ability) may add to player's experience. In some cases you can discover a trick or exploit that makes an otherwise trash skill very useful. OK, bugs and exploits are evil but sometimes they're also amusing and memorable. Of course most things should work as intended but perfection is simply boring.

 

Finally, trade-offs are dangerous. Particularly the example from the article (i.e. higher armor <-> higher speed) tends to be near impossible to balance. Higher speed is almost always preferable because it means you can kill your enemies faster and dead enemies do no damage (usually .

 

So I have my doubts but the idea of no trash options is intriguing nonetheless. I want to see how it'll work in the context of the game.

Edited August 23, 2014 by prodigydancer

[Stun]

schadenfreude

What a cool word.

 

I hope there's a lot of schadenfreude in PoE. When I'm finished playing PoE for the first time, I want to be able to look back and say: Yes, this game did schadenfreude as well as the infinity engine games.

Edited August 23, 2014 by Stun

[Stun]

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting?

Yes.

 

It also hurts replayability for people like me, who like to try and discover and play overpowered and underpowered builds for both role-play purposes and experimental purposes.

[anameforobsidian]

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting? If there are no bad builds what stops player from clicking through chargen screens with their eyes closed picking things at random? If there's no bad gear how can there be good or great gear?

 

Things are good and bad only in comparison with each other. Padded armor may be weak but it lets other armor types shine. Especially if it's very common and dirt cheap. Conversely, full plate tends to be rare, valuable and highly sought after precisely because it provides superior protection. If padded and plate are effectively equal due to trade-offs, why seek either? You can just use whatever drops first till the end of the game (or till the next tier of gear becomes available).

 

Even the possibility of making a mistake (like spending skill points on a seemingly useless ability) may add to player's experience. In some cases you can discover a trick or exploit that makes an otherwise trash skill very useful. OK, bugs and exploits are evil but sometimes they're also amusing and memorable. Of course most things should work as intended but perfection is simply boring.

 

Finally, trade-offs are dangerous. Particularly the example from the article (i.e. higher armor <-> higher speed) tends to be near impossible to balance. Higher speed is almost always preferable because it means you can kill your enemies faster and dead enemies do no damage (usually .

 

So I have my doubts but the idea of no trash options is intriguing nonetheless. I want to see how it'll work in the context of the game.

 

If they can still benefit your playstyle, and you can upgrade armor and weapons without upgrading an entire type.  It's not like in the IE games you upgraded from clubs to maces and never used clubs again.  

 

Furthermore, systems with DT can and to some extent do favor at least carrying heavy weapons, because the difference on bosses is vast.  Sure, the most damaging weapon in the game is a dagger that does 5 attacks in five seconds for 50 damage each, for 250 total.  But when an enemy's armor negates 35 damage per strike, that greataxe that does a massive 200 damage strike every five seconds looks a hell of a lot better.

 

Every option is not as good as the next,  Pistol wielding Barbarians who all focus Con are not going to do as well as an appropriately designed character.  I hesitate to think that systems should be built buggy and exploitable as possible just because its fun to break them.

[prodigydancer]

 I hesitate to think that systems should be built buggy and exploitable as possible just because its fun to break them.

 

I didn't mean that. And - myself being a developer - I assure you there's no need to out of your way to make your code buggy. It'll happen naturally on its own despite your best efforts to the contrary.

[Leferd]

Hey, who deleted my post? 

There are two other duplicate threads. You posted in one of the others. Mods should perhaps combine the threads.

[Tsuga C]

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting? If there are no bad builds what stops player from clicking through chargen screens with their eyes closed picking things at random? If there's no bad gear how can there be good or great gear?

^QFT. I believe our fine Mr. Sawyer has succumbed to the notion that all choices should produce relatively equal outcomes. This is, of course, patent nonsense, but he's from a very different school of thought than those of us who favor a higher verisimilitude quotient in our gaming. Creating a dex-based frontline fighter in leather armor and equipping him with dual daggers should lead to a great many more headaches for the player than a strength-based fighter wearing a chain hauberk and equipped with a broadsword and shield. The latter is appropriate for the role and the former simply isn't.

Edited August 23, 2014 by Tsuga C

[Ink Blot]

I'm not sure that's what Sawyer meant. Maybe it's my own bias at work in interpreting the article, but I got the sense that it wasn't so much the idea of making everything 'equal', but more that you could choose an option and not have it be significantly worse throughout the course of the game.

 

Not sure if I'm being clear, but taking the padded armor as an example, sure you can attack faster with it at the cost of less protection, but does that really make it the same as plate when looking at it over the long haul? Your plate-wearing character can stand in the front lines and whack away while taking aggro and be able to survive since he's not being hit for much damage. Your padded armor wearer can't, even though he's hitting faster. At least, that's what I was thinking. Your padded wearer still won't be an effective tank, basically.

 

Bah, still not sure I explained myself very well.

[Monte Carlo]

*  shakes head *

 

Josh's 'trash options' are my future trololol gaming challenges.

 

I know we're never going to agree, but this game seems designed for the less hardcore 'play-the-game-once' crowd. I've nothing against them at all, in fact PoE should cater for them, but that doesn't mean all must have prizes. Dammit, create hardcore classes, trumpet your trash classes, say "play this class at your peril, here be dragons."

 

I'm sure i'm not alone.

[PrimeJunta]

I'm sure there will be ways to gimp your character, whatever they do. How about leaving all your ability scores at 3 and soloing Trial of Iron and Heart of Fury? Gimped enough for ya?

Edited August 23, 2014 by PrimeJunta

[Monte Carlo]

I don't mean gimp - I mean enjoying different classes as challenges in and of themselves. A run through BG2 with three bards plays differently from a run with three fighters and so on.

[Endrosz]

 

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting?

Yes.

 

It also hurts replayability for people like me, who like to try and discover and play overpowered and underpowered builds for both role-play purposes and experimental purposes.

 

 

The options are never "as good as the next one". A completely level playing field as a design goal is unachievable in an RPG with a dozen interlocked systems. Then why bother with it?

 

-- In DnD-based games, the worst options make the game unplayable on high level, the best options make most of the game trivial.

-- In Pillars of Eternity, hopefully neither of the above will be true.

 

The goal here is that the game should be playable, but challenging on Normal to the very end with all builds. Muscle wizards, fighters with bows, barbarians with arquebuses shooting poisoned bullets, chanters with low Perception, elves with high Constitution, and so on and so on. Different builds WILL offer a different experience, because the same challenge will be easy for one and hard for the other. One can inflict a lot of status effects, the other has strong defenses and stamina regen, the third has a quick damage burst to take down one opponent fast.

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again: You, and everyone else who tinkers with builds a lot, including me, WILL discover overpowered and underpowered stuff in the game. Don't you worry about that.

[Ink Blot]

 

The options are never "as good as the next one". A completely level playing field as a design goal is unachievable in an RPG with a dozen interlocked systems. Then why bother with it?

 

-- In DnD-based games, the worst options make the game unplayable on high level, the best options make most of the game trivial.

-- In Pillars of Eternity, hopefully neither of the above will be true.

 

The goal here is that the game should be playable, but challenging on Normal to the very end with all builds. Muscle wizards, fighters with bows, barbarians with arquebuses shooting poisoned bullets, chanters with low Perception, elves with high Constitution, and so on and so on. Different builds WILL offer a different experience, because the same challenge will be easy for one and hard for the other. One can inflict a lot of status effects, the other has strong defenses and stamina regen, the third has a quick damage burst to take down one opponent fast.

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again: You, and everyone else who tinkers with builds a lot, including me, WILL discover overpowered and underpowered stuff in the game. Don't you worry about that.

 

Pretty much summed up what I was trying to say, only doing a far better job of it.

[Guest Madolite]

I'm a newbie/wannabe game developer myself, and I really like their philosophies in many areas, like the stuff they say about trash options (which have always irritated me in games and makes the devs seem sloppy).

One example of a trash option is "Charisma" in many RPGs. It often doesn't do anything but to improve your trading or give a few extra (but functionally meaningless) dialogue options. As for the trading, most of these games allow you to end up with heaps of money anyways even with minimum Charisma.

I particularly remember all the trash perks in Fallout 3 that give you +skill points, when you eventually get 100 in all skills anyways and you just wasted a bunch of perk points on those. Such are things that I find incredibly sloppy to even have in the game to begin with. That's not to say that I didn't love Fallout 3 in other ways though. It was an awesome game when it came out and I've easily replayed it completely 4-5 times. But it just shows that even otherwise great developers tend to follow some unsavory conventions just so they can brag about "having a lot of stuff".

 

I guess that's my biggest beef with the industry atm. Great developers, but with a bad tendency to hold onto conventions that should've died out a long time ago. Nice to see Obsidian euthanize at least some of them.

 

 

The options are never "as good as the next one". A completely level playing field as a design goal is unachievable in an RPG with a dozen interlocked systems. Then why bother with it?

 

You don't have to choose between making something a trash option and making it optimal. There's a lot of space in-between those two extremes. That's why devs differentiate between "viable" and "optimal". In cases where the given option isn't even viable for anything but the occasional RP experience (if even that), it shows a severe lack of dedication IMO from those devs (or alternately brown-nosing for investors who know little to nothing of game design but just wants another shiny Skinner Box).

Instead of adding 50 trash options into a game, one should instead focus on maybe 10-15 of them and make sure that they're viable. A Bazingagillion weapons in Borderlands 2 doesn't mean much when the actual, real weapon types amount to maybe 6 or 7 and the rest is just visual or random numbers that are either optimal, viable or outright useless. BL2 could've had 1/1000 the number of weapon possibilities and been almost the exact game. Well, maybe rng isn't the best example of trash options, but I'm definitely seeing a lot of devs choosing the rng approach to a rather extreme extent, making the affected features/items lose a lot of uniqueness and character (which could've other-wise been a great way to flesh out the game).

Edited August 23, 2014 by Madolite

[prodigydancer]

The options are never "as good as the next one". A completely level playing field as a design goal is unachievable in an RPG with a dozen interlocked systems. Then why bother with it?

 

...

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again: You, and everyone else who tinkers with builds a lot, including me, WILL discover overpowered and underpowered stuff in the game. Don't you worry about that.

 

This isn't so different from my own thoughts on the matter. But when you advertise "no bad options" without delivering it you fall into another trap - people start QQ on the forums. "Hey, classes were supposed to be equal and now class A is way more powerful than class B. Why?" And if you surrender to their demands and nerf class A things certainly get even worse.

[Caerdon]

This is an interesting reading but I wonder - when every option is as good as the next one doesn't it make choices less exciting? If there are no bad builds what stops player from clicking through chargen screens with their eyes closed picking things at random? If there's no bad gear how can there be good or great gear?

 

A build is bad when your playstyle doesn't match its strengths and weaknesses. So yeah, by blindly clicking through the chargen you could end up with a "good" build, but it might suck at what you're trying to accomplish with it.

[Stun]

*  shakes head *

 

Josh's 'trash options' are my future trololol gaming challenges.

 

I know we're never going to agree, but this game seems designed for the less hardcore 'play-the-game-once' crowd. I've nothing against them at all, in fact PoE should cater for them, but that doesn't mean all must have prizes. Dammit, create hardcore classes, trumpet your trash classes, say "play this class at your peril, here be dragons."

 

I'm sure i'm not alone.

Of course you ain't alone. Run for President and I'll vote for you.

 

You've touched on one of the things I value immensely in the IE games and especially BG2: No Fairness Guarantees. They were *SO* anti-"play-the-game-once-crowd". For example, I loved BG2 the minute I got my hands on it. But I didn't truly appreciate just how utterly great it was until my 4th or 5th playthrough when I rolled up a Wizard Slayer. I thought that since I had an extensive AD&D background, and since I had played the previous IE games to death (BG1, IWD, PS:T) and since This was my 4th or 5th playthrough of BG2, that it wouldn't matter what the class skill-set was. The bottom line in my mind was that I memorized the game and therefore, Game dominance was assured.

 

Nope! Didn't happen that way at all! I found myself getting thrashed like a clueless n00b by a game that seemed to take issue with my smug arrogance and delusions of mastery. As I quickly discovered, Wizard Slayers were simply one of the classes designed for the pros. They were mechanically underpowered. The game can be beat with them of course, but Bioware didn't give a sh*t about "fair", "diplomatic" crap like Level Playing Fields, and "equality for all".

 

As a result, it felt like a brand new game all over again. And this intrigued me so much that I redoubled my efforts to recapture the moment. for the next 13 years I'd explore hundreds of different builds, I'd "throttle" the game's mechanics to the breaking point and I'd routinely fall in love with the game all over again as I discovered other builds that were decidedly weaker (and stronger) than each other.

 

PoE isn't gonna give us that even if it ends up being an excellent game. Because all of the above is in direct opposition to Josh's design philosophies.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Stun

[Grand_Commander13]

I don't know what's worse: the fact that you think Wizard Slayer was designed to be bad on purpose, or the fact that you applaud them for doing it.

 

Seriously, if you want hardcore challenges, there are three built into the game and you can be as hardcore as you want with mods.

[Stun]

That was just the *first* time I discovered an underpowered class build. Later I discovered a few others. The Beastmaster druid build is fundamentally underpowered. Of course, "challenge" is only part of all of this. The first time you discover a ridiculously overpowered build is also one of those magical moments in BG2.