https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw3UoN6ZWu4
Utkarsh posted this video to his Patreon last week, and I’ve been looking forward to folks’ responses to it since. It’s good stuff! Give it a watch.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the balance mandate in Pathfinder 2e – thoughts and feelings that seem to go against a trend in the discourse around the game. Thoughts that often get me labelled an unquestioning white knight of a fanboy.
I’ve gotten to actually play very little PF2e, as a player. Like 90% of my experience with the game has been as a GM – originally a trepidatious and uneasy GM, unilaterally pulling my table away from 5e after the OGL nonsense a few years ago – so I have to admit that my pain points have been very different from many players.
But I’ve come to identify those players’ pain points not as the system, but as their GMs. At least for the ones who I think have valid frustrations. I’ve come to understand that a significant number (a minority, I hope) of Pathfinder 2e GMs functionally run the game as if they are just a computer code interpreter. Too many people are seeing the robust support the system gives them and, apparently, deciding that they don’t have to do any actual thinking.
“The spell/feat/action does what the spell/feat/action does, no more, no less” is a common thing I see said, as I look on in horror and disappointment, realizing that a lot of my peers in this space – both GMs and players alike – get their fun from bureaucratic middle-managment. And while their fun is valid (as is yours), they seem to think that I should be getting my fun from the same thing, and worse, that pages spent on anyone else’s fun are just “bloat”.
But what came out of this video – or, at least, the comments on the promo post on Reddit – is that a lot of vocal complainers are really just feeling aggrieved because they want to be more powerful than the other creatures at the table, players and enemies alike.
u/Killchrono put together a really good response about the bitter feelings that opened my mind to some folks’ feelings about player-dictated power scaling. Or, rather, the lack of it in the system.
I get that this is a big part of what power-gaming was in 3e (and therefore in PF1), and to an extent what it is in 5e, but I have always found this element of the games to be kind of gauche. I mean, I totally get it from a theorycrafting perspective – I like puzzles, and build optimization is a kind of puzzle – but bringing this kind of thing to an actual live table says a whole lot about someone as a person (assuming, of course, it’s not an explicitly gonzo table). So the fact that the designers decided that Level was going to be the measure of character power in PF2, and that that measure was going to be as accurate as possible has been a huge gift to me. Theory-crafters get to keep their lane, but their monster trucks don’t get to squish my little Honda Civic, as it were.
For a while now, I’ve had this feeling that a lot of complaints about “balance” were coming from a place of players being used to break the level curve, but not being able to be honest with themselves that they are, in practice, playing a character that is 2-3 levels higher than everyone else around them. This is not a popular opinion among those who feel held back by the game’s guardrails, of course, but the hollowness of their push-back has kind of solidified my feelings on the issue.
But I was not at all prepared to see people crawl out of the shadows to say, out and proud, that they resented not being able to be more powerful than others at the table. And, while it was only a handful of people being so brash and mask-off about it all, they came fast, and hard, and kind of all over the place.
To plagiarize myself from elsewhere: I was totally blindsided by some people popping in to say the quiet part loud: that they should be allowed to be the main character if they know the magic cheat codes.
It’s going to take me a little bit to shake that one off.
Here’s my comment on the Reddit post:
“Balance” is a really awful word for it. Everyone has an internal sense of what “balance” means, while in game design it’s usually used in a different way. And the discourse around balance, whether it’s fun or not, why it’s fun or not, very often completely misses what balance is.
Balance is a tool.
Full disclosure, I am not a game designer, but I work with game designers in the video game industry, and one of my jobs is to assess balance in their designs using empirical data. And the way designers design for balance, and the way I asses it, is to have standard entities (enemies, player-characters, weapons, consumables… whatever the categories of entities are in your game) and assign that a rating – usually 1, or 100, or 1000, or some other meaningful but easily divisible number – and then compare your other designs to these standards.
In a leveled game like Pathfinder, we would have one such standard per category at each level. In something like, say, Rainbow Six Siege, there’d just be one for each category. For the most part, these are used for helping to generate ELO scores for matchmaking, but for something like PF2, it’d be used to test designs and make sure things weren’t too over- or under-tuned for their level, or for assigning level to a creature or item based on its design (knowing the power scaling for the game, if a Level 1 item has a power rating of 1000, and my item has a power rating of 2500, it would get slotted into Level 3 or Level 4, depending on other factors).
In this respect, balance is a tool for creating predictable or consistent outcomes, something that’s very important to module writers.
But it flows both ways. Just as I can try to design an item with a power rating of 4000, so that it is Level 5, I can also (as mentioned above) just design whatever I want, and then see where it lands on the power scale, and assign it its appropriate level. I can choose to make 120 XP encounters, or I can make the encounters I think make sense, and then know that they are 240 XP, and that the party is either going to need some help getting through it, or that I will need to provide fair warning and possible dissuasion should they try to engage. I can choose to only give players on-level items, or I can super-charge them with PL+3 weapons and have a really good sense of how they will impact the game.
The problem is, not everyone seems to see the B-side to balance. They just see the game as demanding, because guidance is apparently something you can never say “no, thank you” to.
And they see a sea of people talking about how great balance is, and see people confusing balance with rigid constraint while celebrating it. People who tell them that “the game expects” them to play it in a certain way (while the actual lead designers are out there championing the flexibility of the system), and in all of that, the very concept of what “balance” is gets completely and totally beaten down into a pulp.
I play this game because I love saying “no” to guidance, and still getting to feel very confident in how things will unfold. Because I get to do things that make my players feel like bosses without it fucking up my whole campaign. Because it provides me a whole toolbox full of tools that I can use whenever I need them, and everything I need to manufacture tools of my own.
I’m glad it provides other people the constrained puzzle box that they are looking for, but hot damn am I tired of people shouting to the world that that’s all the game is. Because it is so, so, so much more.