A classic concern in TRPGs is in keeping everything balanced. The developers of whatever game you're playing strove to make it a balanced experience, and they likely relied on hundreds of hours of playtesting and refining to strike the right balance. You as a GM can undo all of this careful balancing act with a single action. How do you keep things in the sweet spot, where all the players are equally powerful and no one can magically wave away serious story issues? The short answer is that everything is already kind of broken, and as long as you can compensate as you play, you'll be fine. But of course, it is more complicated than that. Let's dive in.
Before I go further, let me address the elephant I see in the room. I am not a crunchy numbers GM. If you've seen my guide to improvising encounters, you know that I care more about momentum and storytelling than Challenge Ratings and to hit ratios. I cannot provide you a guide to keeping each number in check; rather, I can offer you a mindset for adjusting to the changes you make to the game. If you want a statistical balance, there are dozens of resources for each TRPG to keep it in line with the creators' intentions, but if you are interested in keeping your roleplay-oriented game balanced enough to be interesting, read on.
I asked my mystery campaign group for some ideas to write about here, and both Montana's and Beor's players asked about balance. Specifically what they wanted to know was this: What do you do when a player tries to break the game (what if they succeed)? Bigger topic could just be about handling "failure" as a DM. And: How to politely decline character ideas and why you would do so. I.e., a character wants to play a god in a level 1 one-shot. I'd like to handle each of these ideas in turn. Let's start with a player trying to break the game.
Many GMs have seen it: some players set out to break the game. Maybe they're a min-maxer; perhaps they are exploiting a homebrew rule you've set; they might just be ignoring the spirit of the game you've set out to be more powerful. Whatever the case, having a single player character who is significantly more powerful than the rest of the characters creates problems. People generally play to experience the agency associated with TRPGs, so feeling less able than another character can diminish the player's experience. Sure, some player characters are more capable of certain things than others--a wizard's powerful magic is counterbalanced by how frail and physically unintimidating they are, for instance--but if a character is far and away more powerful than other characters, the balance is off. Especially with beginning characters, we want everyone to feel relatively balanced. Here are some tips to keeping things in order:
For starters, one cause of an overpowered character is the line between beginning and experienced players. To a certain extent, it is your responsibility as GM to work against this. You can use this guide for beginning players to get them started, but you'll want to guide them through the character creation process so that they aren't completely in the dark with it. But there's always the chance that a player will use some knowledge of the game to get ahead. My first thought for an example is when players choose exotic races or classes--these have been less heavily tested and are more likely to be unbalanced. One might look back at Gerald from the Eastweald campaign as a bit overpowered; goliaths are unstoppable in combat, and his access to magic via his custom class made him highly intimidating in a way that other characters would struggle to embody. I generally try to discourage exotic races and classes unless the player is really connected to a specific idea, otherwise I run the risk of granting them unbalanced power. A good general rule is this: if the player has a significant story reason for their background, allow it, but if they're looking more to capitalize on numbers, encourage them to express that idea via the core backgrounds. I know that this generally runs counter to my philosophy of gaming, but consider this: I am not barring players from participating as they see fit--I'm asking them to engage with their characters in a way that benefits the story rather than the numbers. I recommend this for any roleplay-heavy game. As Orson Welles so famously said, "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." Give your players a few limitations (small suggestions), and they will create interesting characters who strike a balance.
To keep your player characters balanced from the beginning, you'll probably need to use your first session as a diagnostic tool. Provide a few challenges in your opening session--some skill checks you plan to use regularly, an encounter, some roleplaying exercises--and take note of who is the most talented with each type of challenge. If the same player emerges as the best at most things (discounting the luck of the dice, considering only bonuses), consider adding a conditional handicap to that character. You can do this gauging of talent by just looking at character sheets if you're confident with that method, but there's no drawback to balancing after the first session. If a single player is overpowered enough to necessitate a change (if it affects how fun the game is for people, that is), you can develop a story reason to adjust that character. Perhaps they have upset their god, who revokes some of their unbalanced power. Or perhaps they are injured in a way that leaves permanent damage, lessening their impact. The main story might come into play--the BBEG might use magic to siphon off some of that character's powers, and only defeating them will restore their powers. You don't want your player to feel short-changed, though, so be judicious about this process. Only resort to this strategy if a player has successfully broken the game. You can rebalance the game later than the first session with a similar strategy, especially if a level up or a magical item unbalances things later on.
One of the most important elements of this process is addressing it with the player. I personally opt for a direct conversation. "You built your character so well that the other characters can't compete. I need to have a collaborative spirit here, so I want to curtail your character's powers a bit. Will you work with me to balance the game?" Most players will understand and play along. What you absolutely do not want to do is come off as accusatory or blame them for breaking the game. They were trying to have fun and may not have recognized that their fun can put a damper on others' fun. Present it as a challenge to that player: how can you still succeed even after being powered down a bit? Once you are working with your player to solve the problem, it will be much easier to balance things. If the player is upset that you want to reduce their character's power, empathize with them; explain that you don't want to impact their fun, but the game as a whole needs to remain balanced for the good of the party. Remember to be diplomatic in this conversation, as you'll need that player's cooperation to make your balancing changes work.
This leads us into our next issue: declining player decisions. Generally speaking, game-breaking behaviors are not a clear-cut issue. There is no action that would always be game-breaking, nor an action that would never be game-breaking. It all depends on context. I think back to the first session of the mystery campaign, when Montana used the spell "Speak with Plants" to question a dandelion in the alleyway where they found a murdered woman. I as DM had not considered that he could find a witness so easily--I had not considered that Montana could simply talk to a weed growing in an alleyway and have a description of the murderer. Using "Speak with Plants" is not a game-breaking action practically ever, but it meant that the party had cut a lengthy step in the plan completely out. It kind of broke the game. By a similar token, "Speak with Dead" could have turned the murder victim into an encyclopedia of information about the murder. (The reason for this unbalance is simple: D&D is not designed to tell mystery stories, so using the system for a mystery means that some effects are not intended for use with what I'm trying for.) Had "Speak with Plants" truly stymied my plans as DM, I could have denied the use of the spell. But doing so would leave a bad taste in the players' mouths--"Why can't we use a basic spell to investigate?"--so I would have needed an appropriate story reason, like the dandelion in the alleyway having been closed up because it was nighttime when the murder happened, thus not being able to act as a witness. But at the time, I played along because I liked the creativity of using the spell. (Side note: I think it is always better to let your players unbalance the game with creative thinking and then compensate for it rather than turning down ideas to keep your plans intact. Remember that improvisation and rewriting plans is part of your job as GM; don't deny your players' plans just so you don't have to work as rebalancing.)
But let's say a player comes up with a truly game-breaking action that you have to deny. Perhaps you're running a game about protecting a royal family from assassination, and an assassin manages to get past your defenses and kill the king. Now the cleric in the party wants to cast "True Resurrection" on the king to negate the effect. (This happened to me years ago; the party had split and I had to decide between keeping the king dead after one player had killed him and allowing the king to come back via the spell.) To allow "True Resurrection" to work as intended would have made the killing of the king (the entire point of the campaign) meaningless; if he could come back as though nothing had happened, what was the point in protecting him in the first place? I had a decision to make as a DM, and I decided to deny my cleric's player. "True Resurrection," I ruled, could bring the king back, but in a weakened form and for only one week; further, should he be killed again, no spell could bring him back.
This was a drastic choice. By reducing "True Resurrection" to such a weaker spell, I made it effectively impossible for dead player characters to regain life after dying. I made the assassin player's actions permanent. I made the cleric fundamentally useless to the king he served. But the other option seemed much worse. The whole campaign had been driving towards assassination attempts on the royal family. The assassin used stealth, invisibility spells, social cunning, and lots of strategy to kill the king. To deny all of that to preserve the spell's integrity seemed to defeat the purpose of the campaign. But you can see how balance factors in here: either player actions hold meaning, or game rules do. I chose player actions because I was running a roleplaying campaign. Choices like these are judgment calls, and you should make them based on what the goal of the campaign is. If balanced combat is your goal, then you would probably choose to make "True Resurrection" function as the handbooks direct. What matters, though, is consistency. Balance relies on the players being able to predict the outcomes of their actions to a certain extent--so if you're defending the sanctity of your story or the balance of combat, stick to your guns. Your players will learn (or you can explain to them) that you are making these choices with a consistent reason in mind, and that will improve their ability to participate.
A note on this idea: it's tempting to view TRPGs are systems where the fun and the magic just naturally flow. But it's work, and it's more specifically group work. Everyone in a tabletop game has joined in a kind of compact: I put forth my time and energy, and I get in return a fun experience with my friends. More specifically, players are looking for a particular experience. Key to those experiences is balance. Balance keeps it so that all the players can meaningfully cooperate, and it makes it so that participating in the story or combat is open to everyone. Most players will understand when you have to curtail a certain detail about the rules or a character as long as it serves to balance everyone's experience. If it's not obvious (and it rarely is) why you're rebalancing things, have a direct, out-of-game conversation about it. It's better to have everyone on the same page than try to handle balancing solely in-game.
Let's tackle something that was suggested by Beor's player: what do you do if a player wants to be a god even as a low-level character? This one requires even more out-of-game talking. I've written before about what to do when your players don't know enough about the game to play confidently, but what about the opposite, when the player is a little too confident (but still might not understand why they need to stay balanced)? This falls into two categories: your player is too confident because they know the game, and your player is too confident because they don't know the game.
If your player is a veteran to TRPGs and comes in wanting to dominate the game, have a conversation with them. You might have already dealt with this issue when building your party; hopefully, you have selected players who all agree on what they game should be like. But let's say for illustration's sake that you have a player who's trying to min-max in a roleplaying-focused campaign, and it's thrown off your encounters. Talk with your player and try to figure out how to compromise. Maybe you allow them to remain excelling in combat but with the twist that encounters only happen when your players are focusing on roleplaying. Maybe you reduce the number of encounters in your campaign to maintain your focus. Then again, maybe your player gets into fights because they know they'll win. Then you have two main strategies. You can be a nice GM and address it with them out-of-game; explain that they should respect what everyone wants from the game and try to invest that player in roleplaying. Or you can be a mean GM: overwhelm them in combat (enemies target specifically that character because they're such a threat) or handicap their character (they might lose an arm, rendering two-weapon-fighting and shields impossible). Make the decision about whether to be nice or mean depending on how the player is acting. If their heart is in the right place, be nice; if they're trying to steal the spotlight or deliberately disrupting the game, be mean.
But maybe your player is confident because they're new. You experience this with players who are strongly into video games most often, but anyone can come in a little too hot. It does create issues: an over-confident player can be reckless, they can drag the party into bad situations, and they might drive the focus of your campaign to the side in search of ways to display their power. Again, you can be nice or mean. A nice GM will scale up and down encounters in difficulty or frequency to suit the party. A nice GM also talks to the player in question and pushes them towards the focus of the campaign. You can take the advice from how to deal with players ignoring your story and meet them halfway--allow the player opportunities to shine in a balanced way while still providing the story you're telling. But you can also be mean: let the player get into as much trouble as they like, but have appropriate consequences. In the National Treasure campaign, I had one player who would kill any NPC they thought they could get away with. When they killed the head guard in a small town, they got the whole party run out of the area. This places the balancing on the other players, who can now roleplay being upset that their plans were scrapped due to this player's bursts of violence. Complaints from other players pretty quickly changed this player's tune, and the bursts of violence stopped. (This is a form of the "evil character in a good party" problem, which you can and should avoid by carefully building your party.) But when you can't solve that problem until after it's already happening like I did in that case, you can always push the story to meet the player's challenges. In that example, the party was run out of about 80% of the towns they initially visited, often because of this particular player. The other players adjusted in their own ways, and I made the guards in the towns they visited hardier and less corrupt to lessen the desire to kill them. It's rarely a numerical change that can fix these problems; story solutions not only solve the problem, but introduce new opportunities for roleplaying.
Finally, Montana's player's big question: How do you handle failure as a DM? Failure, in this specific case, refers to a game becoming unbalanced. Well, as the solutions above suggest, I think the answer is in twisting the story. To illustrate this point, I'll refer to a mechanic I'm using in my mystery campaign. For each unit of the story that my players complete (learning a secret involved in the mystery represents a unit), I grant them a statistical bonus. For the first two sessions, it was a +1 to all Investigation checks. The third and fourth sessions grants a +1 to their choice of Persuasion of Insight checks. The fifth session, the halfway point in the story, grants a bonus of both +1 to Investigation and the player's choice of a +1 to either Persuasion or Insight. Investigation is one of the main skills in the campaign, so granting a small boost to each player character's skill represents both getting better at what they're actively practicing and a classic game reward: something that makes what you've been doing incrementally easier (while at the same time, the story-based checks go up by a similar increment). Likewise, Persuasion and Insight are important skills for getting the truth out of people, which are critical in my story (perhaps even more important than Investigation).
But I'm granting bonuses without the party leveling up. Doesn't that throw off the balance? 5e is very sparing with skill bonuses, especially compared to 3.5; a bonus of as much as +6 is a huge bonus for 5e skills. And Montana began the campaign with a +9 to Investigation. Doesn't giving him an additional +3 over the first half of the adventure break the game? Especially when the core mechanic of moving the story is so far from an average score, this could radically affect balance. Montana is a professional private investigator, so it makes sense that he's especially skilled with this stuff, but what about Beor's and Ais' abilities to keep up and contribute? My answer is simple: yes, it all breaks the game, and that's okay because I can compensate for it.
Especially in roleplaying campaigns, you'll have players whose characters are specialized in certain things. This goes back to classic party design (a balance of strikers, tanks, healers, and experts to keep a party ready for anything). It's not necessarily a broken game if every character has a time to shine. In the mystery campaign, all the characters have access to magic, so that doesn't unbalance them. Ais is actually from the city the game is set in, so she gets access to special information that only she knows. Beor has a variety of magical abilities like his werebear condition and his druid background that make him someone who often grants an important outside perspective on things. Montana's proficiency with investigation skills means he often plays the face of the party, but that doesn't mean he always is. In fact, Montana's high bonuses to skill checks mean that he is likeliest to notice important details, but due to the randomness of roles, he is not the only one who can notice these details. And his identity as a private investigator gives him an excellent set of reasons for being so well-suited to the task. Here we have a story reason for something that is unbalanced, which means we can counterbalance it with another story reason.
So I've broken my game a bit by granting the players stat bonuses to what they're mainly doing. So what? I'm running a storytelling game with lots of roleplaying. Should dice really be the deciding factor in whether that story progresses? What if my players are all at a critical juncture and must notice a particular detail to progress, and everyone fails the roll? It would be ridiculous to hold them back just because the dice said so. Isn't it more interesting to grant the players a success based on their intentions? I have made my mystery players significantly more formidable as investigators, and that actually works well for my storytelling purposes. Not to mention, game design would call for the skill checks to get harder as the story progresses. Since 5e doesn't increase skills when you level up, my players would be always reaching for a particular DC which would grow further and further out of reach. So I broke my game a bit to compensate for the changing experience of the game. What appears to be breaking the game (adding stat bonuses) is actually a remedy for using the D&D system for something it wasn't designed to do (telling a mystery story).
Some GMs would look at Montana's +12 to Investigation checks and dismiss this as a broken game. But as I hinted out in the last paragraph, if you're using a TRPG for anything besides its directly intended purpose (often combat), you're going to need to compensate for the way you're breaking it by stretching its purpose. All of this is to say that an unbalanced game is never a failure. Failure indicates that the game is broken beyond repair, but unbalance in a TRPG just means you have some details to compensate for still.
Exact balance in a game is for D&D battle royales, where the calibration of each number must be precise for the system to work. But for storytelling games, you don't need exact balance. You just need a system to work well enough to support everyone having the experience they're looking for. Some of the conditions I've described above might not even be problems to solve; for instance, a combat-focused player in a roleplaying campaign might be a welcome presence so that everyone knows combat is handled and can focus on what they really enjoy. Similarly, an overpowered character who doesn't diminish the roles of the rest of the party can be very helpful. (My most recent character, a cleric named Asa, is fairly overpowered by most standards due to high ability rolls and some great starting equipment, but since he's the group's healer, no one minds him kicking ass as long as he keeps the party healthy.) Pay close attention when diagnosing balance issues to whether they're causing the other players or the story to suffer. If they aren't, there's very little harm in allowing an unbalanced detail to stand.
So, "failure as a DM" when it comes to balance is really about whether you can recognize balance issues and correct them if they call for it. Any unbalanced detail can be changed by the story to better reflect what you're trying to accomplish. If you're worried that your game is unbalanced, just determine what would fix it and develop a story reason to implement it. The only balance issues that signify "failure as a DM" come from DMs who fight so hard for mathematical balance that the reality of everyone's experience is lost. TRPGs are an art more than a science, so strive for the right effect more than the right method.
That's all for now. I hope that as you strive for a balanced game, you are successful, and remember always to treat your players as unique ingredients in the meal that is your game. Coming soon: how to help players find their fun, what works when trying to tell a grand story, and my variant gods rules. Until next time, happy gaming!
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