The Campaign: Balanced or Unbalanced? The Party: Balanced or Unbalanced? Encounters: Balanced or Unbalanced? 001

Are your campaigns, adventuring parties, and encounters balanced?  What does that mean? How do you define balance in each of these contexts? I would venture (based on forum conversations) that 100 different people would define it 100 different ways.

So I don't know what balance means to you, but what balance means to me is this: A balanced party is the idea that some seem to have that a party should be balanced class by class and race by race on some percentage basis so that it has the "ideal" "perfect" compositions of class and race are present so that every possible strength in every area is available to the party so that they have all bases covered no matter what they encounter. Many from what I read seem to think that they cannot be successful if they don't tell someone "we already have enough X so you have to take Y or Z as your PC".  As the Ref (and a sometime player when I get the chance) I don't think it is ever appropriate to tell someone you have to play "THIS" as your PC.

If the group is all fighting-men or all magic-users or all clerics or all whatever, IMC you can still play and have fun and it is not an automatic TPK if don't have  a "balanced" party.  On the other hand if a player says, "I don't care what I play I just want to play, so what do we need - I'll play that.” well that is a great player and the Ref will remember that. That aside I do not have a problem with an "unbalanced" party and think that it can and should be fun.

Now what a balanced campaign or balanced encounters means to me is that your are designing every encounter to be winnable 100% of the time, the players never have to run or negotiate or whatever, because every counter is a pushover and that in the campaign as a whole the players are not going to have any serious rivals and things are always going to do their way. IMO that is what many people mean when they use the term balance. Using that definition, I don't believe in balance and think things should be unbalanced where the PCs are going to encounter many different challenges and every one needs to be handled differently.  As the song says: You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run. That is a pretty good description of how to play OD&D.

This also ties in with the whole issue of character death in D&D in general and for me specifically in OD&D. Those who advocate balance in the sense noted above are also very opposed (in my experience) to character death and many feel that the Ref should do whatever is necessary to make sure that players never die or if they do, then make sure there is a raise dead immediately available. When I say I never balance encounters, I am saying I do not bend over backwards to remove the possibility of death from the game. I have read on forums where many feel that you should bend over backwards to remove the possibility of death from the game.

Some even noted that even one character dying would bring the campaign to a screeching halt, while I have never had a campaign end due to a TPK. Bitd when we started playing we once had 3 TPK's in one 14 hour game session with 51 characters dying that night. They were first levels that won their first half dozen or so battles, but the moment anything showed up that they should have run from, or have approached cautiously, or attempted to talk to, or have hidden from or at least have taken a good defensive position and thrown a couple of rounds of bow fire into first, they instead insisted on charging into battle and then the survivors picked fights on the way home. That night they exhibited no sense of self-preservation at all. And they did it through 3 rounds of characters all 17 players. They played a lot smarter the next night and no one died in another 14 hour gaming session.

On forums I have read about players going into a major depression if their PC died or wanting to suicide a PC that doesn't have "good enough" stats. IMO this is just not old school thinking or old school gaming. At least in OD&D it is very quick to roll up a new character and a good Ref can work you back into the game quickly. If a low level OD&D character dies I cannot understand people who get really upset by that, where losing an 8th level character that you have played though years of game time, that is another matter, but not to justify major depression IMO. As far as stats, in OD&D, especially with just the 3 LBBs they are just not that big of a deal. We always rolled the character up 3d6 in order and that was it and bitd in my experience no one in our group ever complained about that. In the campaigns I have been running since July 2009, I have been following the original rules, mainly because we have little time to play, and went with this:

Prior to the character selection by players it is necessary for the referee to roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to various abilities, and thus aid them in selecting a role.

Yeah, that is right, I rolled up all the PCs for the players, when they came in there was a stack of about 20 PCs sheets and I told them to pick one. In the most recent campaign I created a PC specifically for each player. No complaints and having fun.  I am toying with the idea of giving them all 18s across the board next time around for fun and since it will not affect the game at all in OD&D, unless somehow it inspires everyone to play smarter.

More to follow in my next post: