Ok, so I've been perusing this board frequently since I purchased Descent (and Altar just yesterday). There seems to be quite a few items/characters that are considered overpowered and have been houseruled from the game. My question is, what items/characters/skills/whatever that are considered the most overpowered and why? If they are so broken, how did they make it in the game in the first place? Are there any decent counters the overlord can take to overcome these problems?

Short answer for "how": content for Descent was produced using simple formulas or (apparently) by just throwing out lots of ideas, without any particular attempt to make things equally powerful. They seem to have gotten better about this in the expansions, but in the base game it looks like range was valued exactly the same as damage, monsters base stats and abilities don't appear to have anything to do with each other, and the skills look like a quickly-brainstormed list of "cool ideas" with no effort whatsoever put into making them equally powerful. Look at Leadership and Endurance and try to tell me with a straight face that those are equally good. Also, notoriously, hero specialists and generalists were apparently considered to be equally powerful, and thus the JitD heroes with 1/1/1 trait dice and skills were given no compensatory advantages, leading to their near-universal scorn.

The most egregious offenders generally seem to be skills--those just have a ridiculously broad spectrum of power, and some of them are massively enhanced through combos with other cards; the canonical example is Rapid Fire, which gives you an extra attack for 2 fatigue, and the Gauntlets of Power, which let you restore fatigue by spending surges.

However, while there exist a few specific cards that tend to elicit a "what were they thinking!?" reaction, it is my thesis that the systemic balance problems pretty much all result from the fact that monsters frequently die in one hit. That means that extra damage has totally inconsistent (but usually very low) value, and therefore AoE and action-granting effects can't be balanced; fights cannot possibly scale to different numbers of heroes (resulting in massive difficulty changes from game size), and so other measures are taken to try to scale the game (like giving the OL extra threat) that screw up other parts of the game in weird ways; initiative is ridiculously valuable, because he who strikes first often strikes last, and so spawns are both very weak and very strong, in different ways, and end up dominating the game's tactics.

But none of those can really be addressed without a massive re-write, of course. It's my impression that RtL made some strides in that direction, because it gave them an excuse to re-stat all the monsters and knock spawn cards over the head with a blunt instrument, but I haven't played it, because of the whole "80 hours" thing.

Antistone said:

Yes. The best descent I have played of any type, by a very wide margin, is in early-mid bronze to mid silver RtL levels. The reason is that a lot of monsters are NOT one-shots at these stages.

Once the heroes have a decent selection of silver gear and are powered up by a couple of skills and a couple of trait upgrades each they are just too powerful no matter how good the monsters get (largely because of excessive fatigue meaning they are much less limited in choosing position over numbers of attacks). But at those early stages, with only one or two skills and limited gear against more powerful monsters, the game is much more interesting (granted, the heroes need some easier monsters/levels occasionally to help them power up, but the tough levels at these stages are the best descent gaming to be had IMO).

I hadn't put this together in my head until Antistones analysis, but this is definitely what I've been feeling. From both sides of the table too....

So...what can be done to help balance this out? Give the heroes less treasure? Give the overlord more power? After having played the overlord a few times, it seems like even just giving the monsters 1 or 2 more armor would help a bunch to stop all the one shots. Or less treasure perhaps. In a 5 person game, they can get 8 treasures just from one person opening the chest!

I limit Rapid Fire to two uses a turn. After two uses its exausted and can't be used again till the players next turn. Since Quick Casting can only be used once, Rapid Fire is weaker in damage but more effective hence it can be used twice a turn. Basically when you tap Rapid Fire, you put your fatigue on it. Once you put 4 fatigue on it, its exausted. Makes the skill far more balanced.

I havent seen the rapid fire / gauntlets combo come out in my games, but I've seen enough on this forum to know it needs changing.

I was initially thinking of reducing Rapid Fire to once per turn, but could be convinced to make it twice per turn. The other option is to allow it to be used once per main attack. So it can be used one for an Advance action and Twice for a Battle action.

I've seen various complaints about different things on this board, but in our gaming we haven't found anything to be truly overpowered, though it's obvious that certain combinations (Rapid-fire and the bracers of fatigue restoring come to mind) that clearly the designers hadn't thought of.

Most of the time, if some particularly nasty strategy or combination comes up, the opposing player can adapt to it, and take steps to avoid it or neutralize the threat. On those rare occasions we can't, we consider tweaks to restore balance.

My advice: Wait to decide for yourself that something is unbalanced or too powerful, and deal with it then. Also, try not to pre-judge, and instead, try to think of what you can do to counter it without changing the rules.

I'm kind of dissappointed when I see comments like those made by Antistone. I often wonder if these people have ever tried designing a game themsevles. While I haven't designed a boardgame, I HAVE designed software systems, and I have seen a lot of similar complaints from end-users. It's obvious to me from reading the forums and news, and seeing how many people work on the games, and for how long they work on them, that accusations that they don't consider game balance or that they don't playtest what they design are simply ludicrous!

If I ever just "threw together" a design for an employer, I'd have my **** handed to me as I was booted out the door. These people are doing the best job they can. If you think you can do better, than do better. Design a better game, put it together, play test it, and let's see if you can make a game as rich and interesting and fun as Descent that stands up half as well to the brutal assault of the many gamers that play it.

The designers of a game could playtest for five years, and it would not see the hours of gameplay and the variety of ideas that are seen by the players in a week on the market.

I'm sorry if this post borders on flaming, but it bothers me how many posters seem to have the attitude that the Descent team doesn't work their butts off for us, and for themselves, and it doubly bothers me how many posters spend far more time complaining than they do trying to come up with a viable solution.

So in answer to the original post: If you're playing the extended campaign, there have been accounts of balance issues in the late game that seem to be justified. The next FAQ is going to be introducing some changes to try and help that. As for the base game, I don't believe anything is really "Broken". Play the game, try to use a level head and common sense to address any confusion you have, and try adopting different strategies before deciding that one character/skill/treasure/combo is too powerful.

Osaka makes some good points. A lot of the perceived problems are a combination of items and skills that are from the expansions combined.

The opinions below are from a rtl perspective.

The general debates seem to be on:

1)Telekinesis some think it is one of the most powerful cards in the game others think it is average.

The only house i've seen which i think we'll implement if it appears in our campaign is that it takes a point of fatigue per square a monster occupies to move it, same as Knockback, and the dice rolled to resist web for large monsters.

and

2) Rapid Fire and the Gauntlets of power combination especially on a high fatigue range character such as Silly girl or Grey Ker: We've limited rapid fire gives an extra attack per attack. So a battle attack one rapid fire, attack two rapid fire for four attacks. Move Attack = Attack, rapid fire for two attacks.

Other things that also get mention are:

3) Nanok of the Blade in rtl could with the enduring card start copper at Armour 5 and by gold have 8 without the use of an item. Nanok is a problem not only because he can have such high armour but also because he frees up lots of the good protective items for other characters so raised the general level of armour across the party. With the right party this could mean three of the characters starting on armour 4 + Nanok isn't such a problem in vanilla descent i expect because you just dont get the opportunity to get his dice that high.

We just dont use him i'm not really sure on the best way to handle him as an OL

4) Spirit walker is a powerful ability especially on Landrec.

5) The Skull Shield is very rude against anything with Breath weapons, that and plate mail on an armour two character is nasty, but can be circumvented by aiming at another character or using it as a none breath weapon as per the FAQ.

6) There are a lot of complaints about the staff of the grave especially in conjunction with 4)

7) Another complaint is Kirga and Bogs the Rat

But as Osaka says most things can be worked around the biggest issue really is two, but for the guys i play Descent with were happy with our solution.

Osaka said:

Understandable concerns, but the answers are: yes, I have designed board games myself, and am currently in discussions with a publisher; and yes, I am currently working on a complete re-balancing for Descent that I intend to make available as soon as it's done. It's got totally new monster stats, items, skills, and quests. Initial reactions from my playtesters are that it's much more fun and balanced--granted, they're biased by virtue of (a) knowing me and (b) being the sort of people that like to play games with me, so take that for what it's worth.

But I do know what I'm talking about and I am investing much more time into solving problems than into complaining about them. I've got a giant spreadsheet with a heavy dose of VBA (coded myself) for calculating the effectiveness of different attacks against different targets and a throughly-considered and defensible basis for comparison; I spent most of yesterday playing with possible stats and abilities for expansion monsters. Compare that to JitD, where the weapons and monsters follow rigid formulae that have no obvious relationship to balance and don't produce balanced results, and I think it's pretty obvious that balance was not a priority for the designers.

A case could probably be made that fine-tuning the balance wasn't important for the initial release and that they deliberately chose to spend their time and energy on other things instead, and that would be understandable--there are a lot of difficult problems other than balance that go into designing a game like Descent. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that the designers worked their asses off. But if you honestly think that they worked their asses off balancing the game, then your standards are crazily low.

Antistone said:

That's actually part of my point. People in a close knit group (like your gaming circle or a group of game designers) tend to think the same way to an extent, and get "comfortable" with each other's styles. This makes it difficult to keep an outside perspective on the project, and it also means that certain problems will escape detection because it doesn't come up given the play styles of that group.

My chief complaint about your post (and I didn't mean to single you out here, as there are many other posts like it) is that the focus of your post was to make an attack on the professionalism of the design team, rather than to answer the original poster's question. You made it sound like you thought they simply threw the game together without giving any thought about whether it would be playable after.

If you had focussed on answering the question that was asked, I wouldn't have been bothered by it nearly as much as I was. I know you must enjoy playing the game, because otherwise you wouldn't spend as much time here as you do, but that post, to a NEW PLAYER, came across to me as if you thought there was nothing but problems with the game, and that the designers didn't have a clue about what they were doing.

(On a side note, I wish you the best of luck in publishing your game. My brother and I have toyed with ideas and a couple designs, but nothing so concrete yet as to be playable, let alone marketable... We do play a lot of different games, and we always enjoy looking over new sets of rules, so if you would like some feedback and/or constructive criticism from someone outside your group, I'd be happy to look over the rules for your games)

As for "re-balancing" Descent, you're welcome to it, but some of your complaints about the game were things I kind of like about it. One example that comes to mind is that many of the monsters can be killed in one good blow from a hero. To me, that speaks to the flavour of the game. In most of the fantasy I read/watch, the only bad guys who stand up to more than a casual glance from the heroes are the "boss" monsters... The equivilent of the master/named monsters in Descent. To me, that's a feature of the game, not a problem. So while you're welcome to make suggestions, and there have been some good ones here, that really wasn't the focus of my post. My focus was on the tone of your post, and that of many MANY others on this board, that spend most of their time either bashing the designers or generally whining, rather than trying to address and solve the problem, or in this case, answering the question.

Antistone said:

I'm sorry if I was off-base about you in general. I'm still fairly new to the board, and so I guess the only posts I saw from you were ones with a similar tone to this one. My point was that there is a LOT of complaining that happens on this board. Your post was simply an example, and I wasn't trying to single you out.

One thing to keep in mind though is that not all monsters and treasures are equal, nor should they be. There are some treasures that no matter how you look at them are inferior to others despite being of the same colour. I don't think this is a balance issue. I think it just adds some variation to the treasures you get from the chests, and keeps things interesting. I'm sure they have similar tools at their disposal for calculating die rolls and attack effectiveness and such... It just seems to me that your vision of a perfect game is different from theirs.

Antistone said:

Or yours are crazily high. :-) And I believe I said they worked their butts off to make the best possible GAME, and I wasn't referring specifically to the balancing (at least, I don't think I said that -- it wasn't my intention to say that anyway)

Putting that aside, I found that the base game was reasonably well balanced. It tended to slant a bit in the player's favour for the early quests, and got a bit harder for them in the later ones. To me, that's a perfect setup, since, especially when dealing with a broad market, you don't want the game to be too hard for the heroes in their first games, or they might not want to play any more ;-D

Your post made it sound like they didn't care at all about balancing the game, and that it had very poor balance. I don't see it. Each new expansion that has arrived has served to shift the "balance of power" one way or the other, but aside from some fairly common accounts of late game balance in RtL campaigns, it seems to still be a fairly well balanced and fun game.

When looking at game balance, I tend to take a broader approach. Individual weapons and abilities might be more or less powerful/useful than the next one, but when taking the game as a whole, is the game slanted in one player's favour or another, and if so, by how much? Is this something that, like the escelating difficulty of the dungeons, was likely intended by the designers, or is it something more serious (like the fact that many of the scenarios in Tide of Iron were exceedingly difficult for the Germans to win)

Yes, there are holes in the rules, but that'll always happen in a game, particularly one that grows as much as it has. You'll see the same thing in computer software; the more plug-ins, extensions, and expansions that a piece of software sees, the harder it becomes to maintain, until eventually they need to start from scratch with a new version. It's a simple geometric progression: If there are N game elements, adding the N+1th element means that there are N new interactions with existing elements you have to consider. So if you add N new elements (so you have 2N elements in the game) you have added approximately 1.5N^2 new interactions. For small numbers of elements, this is not a big deal, but while each expansion makes the game richer and adds new features and skills to keep the game fresh, it also becomes increasingly difficult for them to anticipate every interaction with what has come before. So far, I think that we've seen very few loopholes and truly "broken" combinations given the amount of depth and variety there is in the game, and I think they should be applauded for it!

If you disagree with me on the end result, that's fine. I'm always open to discussion. I don't have a problem when someone sees or points out problems in the game... It just bothers me when people attack the designers, or suggest that they are just sitting on their thumbs. What they do is exceedingly difficult, and I feel that, aside from a few glitches here and there, they've done it very well. I'm just hoping that those who disagree with me focus on making constructive criticism, and not personal/professional attacks. Again, Antistone, this wasn't an attack directed at you personally... Your post was just an unfortunate example of the tone that bothers me.

Osaka said:

The original question asked was essentially "what are the balance problems with the game, and how did they survive long enough to be published?" I think my answer was pretty well on-target. If you don't want to hear people complaining about the bad parts of the game, don't read a thread that is specifically about problems with the game.

Osaka said:

It ceases to be purely a stylistic thing and becomes an objective problem if it messes up other parts of the game. Monsters dying really quickly isn't a problem in its own right, but it causes cascading problems: it renders much of the game's complexity (such as the specialized die rolls, strategic positioning, and many combat bonuses) superfluous in many cases, reducing the game's depth-to-complexity ratio; it causes the game to scale extremely poorly to different numbers of players; etc.

The game could conceivably be re-designed in such a way as to keep the style of monsters dropping like flies while eliminating the other problems, but this would entail changing the game much more than is necessary to eliminate the problems by making monsters harder to kill (which allows you to keep all the same actual rules, just by changing stats around).

Osaka said:

This is a valid consideration. I don't actually want all the cards in a given deck to be precisely equally powerful (even if that were possible), and while I think the variation they have is far too much, if they genuinely wanted to make the game less about strategy and more about sheer luck, that would be a feasible way to accomplish that. I'm doubtful that was actually their intent, but I suppose it's possible.

However, there's at least 3-4 major issues that can't be addressed by that, even hypothetically:

1. The game difficulty changes dramatically based on the number of heroes in the game. That's not a difference in the amount of luck involved, since the number of heroes is not a random variable.
2. The shop equipment varies widely in effectiveness, to the point where the sword is probably a better buy for a range-specialized character than the bow in JitD. Again, this is not a random variable, as heroes freely choose among shop weapons; additionally, the fact that they buffed up the bow (though probably not enough) in an expansion suggests that they agree this was bad.
3. Heroes can learn specific skills in RtL, rather than choosing them at random; this is a strong indication that they are supposed to be balanced against each other.
4. (Speculative) While randomizing the effectiveness of OL cards can increase the luck-dependence of the game to an extent, the OL actually selectively discards a large fraction of his cards, and the difference between good and bad OL cards is so vast that many cards are essentially always discarded. A similar degree of randomness in the game could likely be achieved with far less complexity and content generation by injecting the randomness somewhere else, so this would probably be a poor design choice even if increasing randomness was your goal. Additionally, the ability to swap cards out with treachery may suggest the cards are supposed to be balanced against each other.

Regardless, the designers have made measured improvements towards my ideals in the expansions and design notes made after JitD was released (such as recognizing that specialized heroes are better than generalists, evening out treasure distributions, making monsters harder to kill in RtL, and generally publishing cards that are closer to the median power of their respective decks), so I don't think this is actually a disagreement in goals (or at least not primarily that), but that they perceive the same problems as I do and are working to correct them.

Osaka said:

I've already written quite a lot about the concept of game balance. Not everyone uses the word in the precisely same way, but I've tried to stay close to common usage. What you are describing is what I call "fairness," and it's a concept that's related to what I call "balance," but you can have a fair but unbalanced game, or a balanced but unfair one (and sometimes that's even desirable--like when you want an easy first quest to help people learn the game and get them hooked, or when you want to handicap a good player for a more interesting game).

In any case, I don't think the designers should be immune from criticism. If you think the evidence of their work shows that they are dedicated and insightful, and you encounter someone accusing them of being sloppy and lazy, you should point to specific things that show that the designers have done good work overall, not make personal (or even impersonal) attacks against the complainer. It doesn't really matter whether I've ever designed a game or am willing to lift a finger to fix a problem if my criticisms happen to be correct, so you should be showing why I'm wrong, not flogging me (or anyone else) for daring to speak out against FFG.

For example, you could point out how clever the conquest token mechanic is, because it makes it possible to have tanks that are still sometimes worth targeting, and makes it so that the firepower the OL needs at his disposal is essentially independent of the number of heroes, thus greatly reducing the problems with adapting the game for different numbers of players. That's a powerful and elegant idea that you won't find in HeroQuest or D&D, and it helps the game a great deal.

I have to agree with Antistone - noone should be immune to criticism, especially the constructive kind: it is broken, let's fix it.

Also, even though Descent is a good game, that fact alone should not make it immune to criticism. A person's good aspects do not cancel out his flaws, they exist in parallel.

So. Descent is good, has cool mechanics, an unique gameplay style. Nice.

But it has its flaws, and has been sewn with a hot needle at times - it is obvious in the sometimes inconsistent use of terms, and especially in some things that are totally capable of breaking the game.

See, this game is competitive. So, both sides should have a chance to win; by thinking smarter than your opposition, you should be able to outplay them, and reap victory. It is when flawed mechanics cause the players to deviate into absurd plays that are not fun and leave little options for the other side that it breaks. A designer has to search for mechanics that cause this to occur and fix it; otherwise, an unsatisfactory play experience will result, making the players a) stop playing the game in question b) not purchase its expansions c) be wary against other games from the same publisher.

So, criticism helps FFG make cash. Players find a flaw. You look at whether the flaw is indeed there. If so, you FAQ it. Players will a) thus help you to make a better second edition of the game b) enjoy it more and feel that they will not be left alone when they buy another product from you, thus buy it more readily.

Blizzard Entertainment, successful as hell mind you, already uses its customers as playtesters, and all those busy geeks ferret out many a flaw in their games. Also, they patch their games frequently. Why do people play StarCraft 10 years after its release with fervor unmatched?

FIrst, to respond to Xandria's comments, which will be quick:

I agree wholeheartedly that constructive criticism is the life's blood of any endeavour. I'm guessing I either got too far off track from my origininal intention, or it got lost somewhere along the lines... My original post was in response to the general tone of negativity and general attacks on the professionalism of the designers rather than directly addressing the problems of the game. It wasn't specifically Antistone's post, but I was rather talking about the general tone I saw in a great many posts on the board.

It's always hard for me to ignore the negativity and see the underlying problem that the poster is REALLY trying to address, and such negative criticisms rarely do much to help anyone. Designers are more likely to listen to criticism when it isn't mixed with phrases that insult their compitence, and other players are more likely to have helpful responses when issues and problems are phrased constructively.

Now on to Antistone's reply:

Antistone said:

Rereading the original question, I could see where we saw things differently. When I originally read his question, I more-or-less ignored his query about why they ended up left in the game, because it's not the type of question I feel I can answer. Anything I suggest (and have suggested) along those lines are purely conjecture. The fact that the majority of his post was asking for specifics about cards and combinations that people particularly took issue with was, to me, the main focus of his question. So to see your long (relatively speaking -- your initial response is tiny now compared to this discussion) post making broad criticisms about the came, containing what I felt to be a lot of negativity and very few specifics, bothered me more than a little. This was probably aggrivated by my having already read many horrifically negative posts in the same day, many (if not most) of which were less helpful and more inflamitory. I apologize that yours was the post I chose to respond to the way I did. I probably would've been better served to start a different thread, and make more general statements on the subject, but I felt it would come across as whiny and not as a serious concern.

Antistone said:

I think we're seeing different things in this case... To me, the fragility of many of the monsters simply makes me take a different approach when controlling them. I know that my beastman isn't designed to go toe-to-toe with their main fighter, so they tend to attack in groups, and if at all possible, they do so in such a way that they can duck back out of the way so as not to suffer the brunt of a battle action, or, at the very least, cost the hero their fatigue to close the distance. As for the specialized die rolls, quite often I find that a point of armour or a single surge is the only difference between a kill or not... Or I find that the push-dagger with its bleed token is just that extra bit of damage I need to get the kill (or in some cases, the only way to reliably wound a heavily armoured target)

The game could be re-designed in a lot of ways. Making the monsters more difficult to kill would require re-balancing every scenario (see my definitions of "Fair" and "Balanced" below) and would cause some very widespread changes to the way the game plays out. I know you're over-simplifying your solution for the purposes of our discussion, but it's not such a straightforward change.

Antistone said:

Yes, luck plays a significant factor in games like this, as evidenced by the fact that you get random treasures and skills rather than picking them. Some games are more dependant on decision-making and strategy, and some are more dependant on luck. I've played games at the far end of both spectrums (my favorite example of an almost completely "luckless" game is Avalon Hill's Civilization) Descent sits somewhere in the middle, and given the type of game it is, I think the fact that it leans a bit in the luck direction is fine by me. ANYWAY, on to your points:

1. I've only generally played the game with four heroes and an OL, so I wouldn't be able to comment too much on the relative difficulty... I doubt they simply "fudged" the stats for fewer or greater heroes though. The fact that I usually see the same number of people complaining that it's too hard for the OL with 3 heroes as I do saying it's too hard for the Heroes in the same situation seems to suggest that it works out at least reasonably well. When you're dealing with two sides of the scale though, it's hard to add or remove a significant chunk from one side without having an equal chunk you can remove from the other side. In other words, when you add or remove a hero, you're changing the number of attacks their team gets in a turn, the area in which the overlord can spawn monsters, the skillset that's available to the team... It's exceedingly difficult to restore that balance simply by buffing or nerfing the monsters.
2. Yes, a bow does less damage. And yes, they made a change to it later, which shows that they're willing to listen to criticism. But to counter your point, if a bow was as effective at killing things as a sword, you'd be saying the reverse -- that a melee hero would take a bow. Really you're dealing with apples & oranges (and pork chops, if you include magic) To me, I don't expect the bow to have as much force as a sword, because the range of a bow allows the attacker to stay at a relatively safe distance. It's a tradeoff between killing power and safety. In other words, I agree that I like the bow better now than how it was, but I don't think there was necessarily anything wrong with it in the initial game.
3. While skills all cost the same amount of XP and gold to learn in RtL, the locations you need to go to find them impact their availablity. Some of my favorite skills, and ones that I'm sure are considered more powerful, tend to be in locations that are harder to reach and/or are particularly vulnerable to seige. So I disagree with your proposition that all skills are treated equally in the campaign.
4. Which OL cards do YOU feel are useless? There are a couple cards I always remove from the deck with the Avatar upgrade in the campaign (gust of wind, for example) because they don't adapt well to the smaller dungeon floors you see in the campaign, but as for the rest, I feel a lot depends on your play style. There are cards I almost never find useful that my brother uses to great effect when he's the overlord, and visa versa. I'd be interested to hear your take on what cards you consider to be less worthwhile.

As for the changes we've seen in the expansions, it's not necessarily that they have the same vision for the game as you... It could be that they've been responding to the public's reaction to the game, and catering to what we want the game to be. Or you could be right and they decided that there were problems in the base game that needed fixing.

It's hard to take RtL as an example of "fixes" to the game, or intentions on how they perceived the base game, as turning Descent into a campaign involved making some pretty dramatic changes to all aspects of the way the game is played. I think they did a good job of the whole thing (it's kind of funny, actually... My brother and I were throwing design ideas back and forth for about a year for a Warhammer Quest type game, and the first previews for RtL had most of our core game elements in common) but I feel that to look at its game balance and compare it to the base game of Descent is difficult, as they have almost as many differences as they have commonalities in the way the game progresses. That's purely my take on it, you understand, but I find it hard to look at anything in RtL as a "fix" for the main game.

Antistone said:

Here's a good example where the two of us are speaking an entirely different language :-) To me, I have those two definitions completely opposite to yours. To me, "Balance" always refers to two elements in opposition. On a scale, you're dealing with two weights, in physics you're dealing with opposing forces, in chemistry you're dealing with concentrations. In a game, I see balance as the state where two opposing forces (namely, two or more competing players) don't have an intrinsic advantage over one another; that they are essentially evenly matched. You call this "fairness".

To me, "Fairness" refers to whether the rules allow for a game where no player can manipulate the rules to gain an unfair advantage over the other. Players who seek out loopholes in the rules or otherwise seek out combinations that undermine the game, to me, are "unfair" players. Sort of like the kid in the playground who finds ways to cheat and get away with it.

Personally, I feel that your definitions for "Balance" and "Fairness" are completely backwards, but then again, you probably feel the same way about mine :-D

Antistone said:

Actually, I think people should focus on criticising the work. Yes, there are people who are deserving of criticism, but I know that I have never seen firsthand how these people work, and I'm fairly confident you haven't either. The only thing we see is the result of their work, and so I think we should focus our criticisms there, and not offer conjecture about what the designers were doing or thinking when something happened. The truth is that we don't know. Their employers (and even their co-workers) can certainly criticise them about the way they work, if they feel it would help... But I honestly don't see what is to be gained by ANYONE making accusations that they are "sloppy or lazy"

And I've said this before, but I'll say it again; I wasn't making a personal attack against you, I was making a more general criticism about the negative tone people tend to take on this board.

Antistone said:

I didn't think I was flogging you, so I apologize if my posts have come across as an attack against you. BUT, it does kind of matter if you've been involved in designing and publishing a game when you're criticizing the PEOPLE who did the work. You're right that none of that affects whether or not your criticisms are correct. And if you were just giving constructive criticism concerning elements of the game (or the game as a whole) then there would've been no issue. But as soon as someone suggests that the people involved weren't doing their job, or that they were "sloppy and lazy" I begin to wonder if the poster could do any better in the same situation, and how much the poster knows about having a career in game/product design. Personally, game design is a hobby for me. I highly doubt it'll ever be more than a hobby because of the simple fact that I doubt I could keep my creativity and productivity up if I was working on the same project (or even the same set of projects) 40+hrs/week. I do have a fair bit of personal experience with software systems design, which bears a number of similarities, though it lacks much of the creative aspect.

Criticising the work just takes a working pair of eyes and a half-working brain. Criticising the worker requires a lot more personal knowledge of the staff and the job than I think either of us have, though I could be wrong.

Oh come on. You "doubt they 'fudged' the stats for fewer or greater heroes"? You think that +1 wound per hero across the board is a carefully-analyzed and delicately-calibrated system? Have you even looked at the game, Osaka?

Look, I'm sorry if you were offended by my post, but "the stats for this game were apparently generated by simple and easy formulas rather than balanced in any serious fashion" is an informative criticism of the game itself (and constructive in the sense that it suggests a specific course of action that will lead to improvement) and the same information cannot be conveyed succinctly without referencing the apparent process. It is also a direct and relevant answer to an explicit question in the original post. Telling me that I should be less negative or focus on the game instead of the work is spurious.

And your defenses of the game generally seem to be of the form "well, maybe they wanted it to work that way!" or "I'm sure that getting this right is really hard." While possibly correct, neither of those is really an interesting issue to discuss. I have made a substantial effort to tie my criticisms back to specific game traits that are widely recognized as positive (meaningful player choices, tactical depth, predictable difficulty, elimination of unnecessary complexity, consistency between presentation and reality, etc.) and point out specific ways they could be improved. Arguing that I cannot 100% prove that they actually wanted to attain these widely-recognized virtues or that the game's flaws do not result in it being totally unplayable is rather missing the point. If you redefine the target to be whatever the game actually achieves, then every game is perfect.

I'd just like to apologizing for opening this can of worms. ::backs slowly away to another topic::

Back to the orinial topic (instead of balance in general, and combined with all expansions), hoping McRae will still read it.

In the normal game I would remove gauntlets of power from the game (overpowered) as well as Mata and Kata (too underpowered).

It is also important to remember that the heroes are drawn randomly without choice. Allowing more than a single blind redraw will most certainly shift the balance to the players to much. The redraw might be needed, since it is no fun to play a character you dont like for 3 hours straight. (always allow redistributing the characters between the players though. It does not matter who plays the character, just that the players cannot put a perfect party together).

And after playing the scenarios a couple of times you will notice that gold treasures are the point where the game breaks. If this is starting to be a problem try replacing the gold chests with silver ones. This is also justified by the newest (surprisingly balanced) scenario's of FFG where they left out the gold treasures themself.

An apology to everyone for a conversation that is obviously spiraling out of control, and has left behind most of the connection to the original topic... Antistone and I obviously have many views (and even defiinitions) which are radically different from each other, and I think we could discuss/argue this back and forth for a year and never see eye to eye... No fault of his (and I don't think it's a fault of mine); we just have many different attitudes and viewpoints that are apparently incompatable. Add to that the fact that, while I can be wordy, that doesn't necessarily mean I've done a good job of communicating my views.

I think at this point we would be talking past each other as much as to each other, so I'll bow gracefully out of the thread (or is that stumbling and falling out of it?)

My final words of advice to McRae:

1) Play the game, and decide for yourself what works and what doesn't. There are a couple combos in this game which I would classify as exploitations of the rules (the most notable example being the fatigue gauntlets and rapid fire) but you can deal with those as they become a problem.

2) An open dialogue is helpful, and if you see something that YOU could exploit that seems unfair, try to resist until that round of the game is over, and discuss it with your fellow players to decide if it is legal and fair. It's your game (you paid for it, after all), so you don't necessarily have to follow the letter of the law. Try to encourage the same behaviour from your fellow players.

3) There are a lot of people (including myself sometimes) who get caught up in the statistics and details. It's a dangerous habit, as it's an easy way to lose perspective on the game as a whole. Luck plays a significant factor in this game, though it does not trump planning and strategy.

I hope you see my advice, and I hope that it is helpful to you!