I understand nothing is ever truly in balance, however there are some martial careers that seem much better than others and there are some social careers that are much better than others. What are other peoples views ?

I played 1st ed and 2nd ed, i literally bought 3rd ed recently (core, winds, signs, gm toolkit and player toolkit to start with). We were going through characters with my groups (and son) and some of the careers even of the same "type" seemed too good.

Irobreaker is broken b/c of item. Others are good imho.

jh

In addition to my last post, which was rather unhelpful, here are some other thoughts:

1. To tame the ironbreaker item broken-nessand without forcing the PCs to go on some quest every-single-time-someone-wants-to-play-one, just start him with heavy armor of some kind and let him "earn" it at some point (5 experience points or something). Other people have simply made them an intermediate or advanced career that a dwarf character has to earn.

2. The GM really needs to make sure he's enforcing fatigue/stress when a combat-oriented character attempts actions that the SOCIAL character of the group should be doing. For example, a loudmouth PLAYER of a trollslayer with a fellowship of 2 should really SUFFER when in social situations just as a social character (e.g. Envoy) does in combat situations. A good rule of thumb is that to complete a task/convince someone should be equal to the willpower of the NPC..that way a combat-pony-character doesn't get a good roll and steal the show too often and outshine a social character

3. Some careers have somewhat better/worse abilities, but they don't really amount to much because there are simply soooooooo many other abilities that the player gets to pick.

jh

jh

..

YokuniCat said:

Moving from 1st/2nd (like me), you'll find balance between careers a LOT better! Let alone from the fact that there is no longer a stat called "attack" which some careers can advance from start.

Like someone mentioned, the biggest balance tipper, is the Iron-Breakers armor. I dealt with this by saying that the Iron-Breaker can get earn this armor by completing the career (shows his clan/family that he deserves to wear it), and till then the player HAS to purchase the heaviest armor, so he has to start with a lot of gold.

Apart from that the balance issues, lies in which skills the careers can purchase. As most people mean combat, when talking about balance, having access to Weaponskill, Resilience, Disciplin and Coordination will give you an "advantage", as will having access to the stats Strength, Toughness and to some extend Agility will also give you an "advantage".

But no career gives you all of this, some gives you a good deal of the good stuff, but it's very hard to get it all.

Concerning social careers, they all seem very equal, although the Gambler gets a HUGE advantage in his career talent (allow one full reroll/session), which in our game has saved the gambler and the group several times.

Spivo said:

Great idea

/steals

I never really thought the careers needed to be balanced. The Rat Catcher is not meant to be as 'powerful' as a Bright Wizard. I see it more as a series of options to roleplay the character you want, with the difficulties attached to that career. I suppose one could even think of it as a level of difficulty in playing WFRP3. An Iron Breaker might be considered 'easy' given the unbalanced features mentioned above, while any number of classes like Rat Catcher or Servant might be considered 'hard'.

There are loads of discrepencies in balancing the careers but i believe that is done or purpose to represent the variety of citizens in the empire.

Gitzman

I agree with Gitzman, my feeling is that the Devs have decided to cater to players who want gritty survival horror adventures (the classic WFRP and Cthulu style) as well as those who want to be fantasy heroes (Wardancers, Iron Breakers et. al)

You'll only really run into trouble if you have players who want different things in the same group, and only then if the players with 'weaker' characters feel bad about it. Then you can either give the weaker careers a boost or nerf the stronger careers depending on how generous you're feeling

commuterzombie said:

I completely agree, my problem with IronBreakers is though that one in the party, with the armor, means I, as a GM, have to use quite strong monsters/npc's to hurt him, and because my monsters/npc's uses tactics (depending on brains), this means the weaker characters will be the target of quite nasty opponents, which will result in constant deaths.

But otherwise I don't mind what players chose

Spivo said:

I've been considering a house rule that groups of henchmen do minimum damage equal to the number of participants in the group (so a group of 3 does 3 min to passthrough armor rather than 1, or number of crits). It balances out the fact that they could overwhelm an armored opponent if they split up (doing 1 damage a hit each).

That may help to solve the ironbreaker armor issue.

Yea. Personally, I like it when the RPGs I play roughly balance all player options against each other. Perfect balance will never be achieved. But, I don't really have fun (as either a player or GM) when some players become little more than sidekicks to those who chose more powerful options. The idea that such imbalance is acceptable has always struck me as a little odd...

Note: This is not a complaint about WFRPG 3e. I have not played the game long enough to really pass judgement on the existence of balance or lack thereof. I only just picked up the system. And, from what I have seen so far, I love it.

I agree with Gitzman, Commuterzombie and Spivo in that the careers don't really need to be balanced. But having said that, I think they are (mostly) pretty balanced. They each have a single special ability, 2 possible stat increases, roughly the same number of advance options... It's not like it used to be with some characters with only a few options and others with loads. Plus each career is limited to 10exp being spent in it.

For me, the main advantage is that there's no 'bad' career. Whatever you're playing, you'll have useful options (although useful depends upon the direction you want your character to go in), as long as you want to develop you character in a way that is appropriate to the career that they are in.

Although some (like the ironbreaker) can cause problems, I would argue that it's not just the armour. If / when I run a game, I want quite a gritty, traditional feel. Ratcatchers, scribes, gamblers, mercenaries (all or most of the party being human)... Anything very outlandish would spoil the theme I want.

Another example would be that if you wanted a social game with lots of court intrigue, then a thug character would be 'unbalancing' because they wouldn't be able to fit into the game very well.

The simplest way to solve any issues you have as a GM is to simply remove any careers you don't like from the deck that players are picking from (or choosing from, if you're letting them do that).

Unless you're playing quite a specialised adventure though (like a courtly drama), then there probably won't be many that you'll feel the need to remove.

The only thing that affects the balance of careers is the career ability nothing else. The dockhand has a good one, better than the performer as exmaple, but in moste cases that is a matter of opinion. Ironbreaker and swordmaster have mighty ones.

I would go out on a limb and say if we wanted 'balanced' careers, there would be no need for all these fancy professions which such fabulous depth and variety. If they were all balanced, they would all be the same more or less, and we'd be left with Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Wizard.

Gitzman

Gitzman said:

The idea that balance equals homogenization is fictitious. Offer a wide variety of options does not automatically mean that those options have to be imbalanced...

Cyber-Dave said:

That is right, but as every Descent player can tell you more compley games and rules are harder to balance. I would go with gitzman´s opinion, but i donnot have powergamer in my group and so no discussion whether one careers is mightier than the other one.

Cyber-Dave said:

But from a game perspective it is hard to balance a lot of careers with each other. So I'd have to go with Gitzman here, to gain balance there would be fewer careers. And I'd rather want more careers than more balanced careers (even though the careers are quite even/balanced).

And I like that the careers differ in skill set, career skills, talent slots etc.

Furthermore balance is very hard to measure when the careers are so different. Some are really not combat careers, so how do you measure their balance towards an all out combat career?

k7e9 said:

I am too new to this game to really discuss balance in regards to this game. I have just got into it. In some games, measuring balance is a very hard thing to do. Every type of character specializes at performing in a different area of the game's mechanics. Every character acts as a sidekick in some encounters and the primary protagonist in others. I am fine with that (as long as each area of specialty is equally robust and developed mechanically speaking). I guess what I Iook for is a game where different charactesr that specialize in the same area of the game are equally effective at that area of the game, and where every character choice has the abiity to meaningfully contribute in some (major) area of the game. My first impression of WFRPG3 is that it does deliver this. I have not seen anything that screams out to me as being much more effective than everything else. But, I am too new to this game for that impression to really be meaningful as of yet. If that turns out to not be true I will probably be a little upset... of course, I don't expect balance to be perfect. It never is. I just expect it to be fairly even, with a few rare hiccups here and there (which I will have to house rule).

It's an RPG. Careers are not meant to be balanced between each other. PCs don't fight each other (usually). In general, yes, FFG has made the number of advances, skill, slots, and bonuses for careers relatively similar.

However, careers were primarily designed around roleplaying, and not for a sense of balance with other careers. So, some careers will have a "better" career ability than others, or "better" set of advances.

I think there are also degrees of balance rather than just "balanced or not balanced."

The careers appear to be balanced within a certain range. Some may be better than others,but only by small degrees. None are grossly over- or under-powered, and there seems to be a modest attempt to keep them all in line with each other without resorting to rigorous number crunching or analysis.

dvang said:

Just because PCs don't fight each other, that doesn't mean that balance isn't still important to an RPG. An RPG is still a type of game. It isn't very fun playing a role playing game when you live in the shadow of the other players. It makes your contributions seem meaningless. But yea, I think Doc Weasel is correct. At least, that is my opinion based on what I have seen from the game so far. As I have said, I am too new to this game to really judge it accurately as of yet.

It's not really balance that's important; it's niche protection. If your character is supposed to be the party Face-man, and another character just happens to be better at it, it's not going to be as fun for the first player.

GravitysAngel said:

Agreed. And well said.

oops. double post...

I was just making a comment that I have noticed in our first game. This is my party breakdown.

Ironbreaker

Swordmaster

Wardancer

Apprentice Amber Wizard

The one I expected to be over powered (in a bad way) was the wardancer - not so, a lot of flavour with the ritual dances but not overpowered. The ironbreaker just could soak a lot of damage and produce a steady stream of damage. The wizard did bursts of damage and shape shifted a lot, nothing shocking there.

But the swordmaster... wow, I dont know if he was lucky or just picked the perfect talents and actions but he put everyone else to shame. I made a note of his damage after the first round due to the disparities.

1st round - like 14 damage

2nd round - 18 damage (highest from others was 8)

3rd round - 21 damage (this was where my jaw dropped)

From what I understand by the third round he was as conservative as he could be and he had 3 bonus damage and 2 bonus fortune dice because of it. This is what I meant by balance. In combat he outshined EVERYONE else to the point where the wardancer player got upset. I tried to explain to her that 2 handed weapon made a big difference so she swapped around some stuff and got a 2 handed weapon as well. Still on the second fight it was the swordmaster who shined killing the wargor on his own with several criticals.

I personally dont mind a little unbalance it is going to happen, but this was a very wide gap and they are both what I would call 'elite' type troops. This was where my balance issues came from.

@YokuniCat: With this constallation of players the first fight should have been between those guys. Warhammer RPG was never a heroic and hopefully will never be a heroic RPG, why did you let those guys choose their careers and why are they that fixated on doing the biggest harm?