Game Balance Is Not the Same Thing as Sterility

Game balance matters.

Let’s get that out of the way first, because this is not an argument against balance. This is an argument against what the abused term game balance has increasingly come to mean in modern tabletop RPG culture.

In too many newer RPG conversations, “balance” has become code for sterility. Predictability. Homogeneity. A carefully padded room where no one is ever truly outmatched, no one is ever seriously in over their head, and no one ever has to say the most exciting sentence in adventure gaming:

“We need to run.”

That is not balance. That is predictability with buttons to push on character sheets.

And adventure is not supposed to be a safe choice.

What Balance Should Mean

At its best, game balance means that every player has a chance to meaningfully participate.

If one character is a walking fortress and the entire session becomes that character plowing through a hallway full of lizardmen while everyone else watches, that is not great gameplay. It may be fun for the megatank. It may be boring for everyone else.

That is a real balance problem.

But the solution is not necessarily to make every character equally good at hallway-plowing. The solution is twofold: a) design situations where different characters matter in different ways, and b) discourage uncreative, lazy, thoughtless gameplay. Force the players to find innovative ways to assert their characters.

Maybe the megatank holds the line while the engineer disables the gate mechanism. Maybe the wizard reads the battlefield and spots the ritual structure empowering the enemy. Maybe the operative finds the hidden route, steals the key, sabotages the alarm, or drags a wounded NPC out of danger. Maybe the party face talks a terrified prisoner into revealing the passage behind the shrine.

The goal is not for every character to do the same thing with different visual effects.

The goal is for every player to have a reason to lean forward.

That kind of balance is good. That kind of balance keeps a table alive.

What Balance Should Not Mean

Balance should not mean every character succeeds at roughly the same rate all the time, outputting roughly the same amount of damage.

Balance should not mean every combat encounter is calibrated so precisely that the players can assume the fight is “supposed” to be winnable.

Balance should not mean every locked door, social encounter, wilderness hazard, monster, trap, or magical disaster exists inside a narrow expected-success band.

And balance absolutely should not mean that every character is entitled to be in the spotlight at all times.

There is nothing wrong with your barbarian being bad at picking locks. There is nothing wrong with your pilot being unable to hack the system. There is nothing wrong with your psionicist having terrible etiquette. That is not a design flaw. That is texture.

Characters should have edges. They should have strengths. They should have weaknesses. They should sometimes look at a problem and say, “This is not my lane.”

That is one of the reasons we play party-based games in the first place.

The Pendulum Swung for a Reason

A little RPG cultural history is helpful here.

In the early days of roleplaying games, the balance of power often favored the Game Master heavily. That is understandable. RPGs were new. There were not many models for cooperative storytelling games. The hobby grew partly out of wargaming, and some of that competitive mentality came with it.

GM fiat was powerful, and sometimes it was abused.

That does not mean GM fiat is bad. I do not think tabletop RPGs can function without GM judgment. But it is fair to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of tables leaned hard into “because the GM said so.” In some cases, too hard.

Over time, the pendulum began to swing toward the players. By the late 1990s, and especially around the turn of the millennium, player agency had become a much stronger design concern. This was a good development. The hobby became less adversarial. More people recognized that the GM is not supposed to “beat” the players. There is only one possible outcome when a GM arm-wrestles the table: the GM wins, and the game suffers.

So rules became clearer. Player options expanded. GM authority was reined in. More games began emphasizing collaboration, player input, and shared investment in the world.

Again: good.

But pendulums do what pendulums do.

They keep swinging.

Familiar Footing, Flattened Worlds

Modern game companies want players to have a consistent experience. If someone buys a game, sits down at a convention, joins an online group, or plays an organized campaign, the publisher wants that experience to feel fair, welcoming, and familiar.

That impulse makes sense, to some degree, but also results in the most popular games being essentially on par with McDonalds.

But there is a cost when familiarity becomes sameness.

At a certain point, the game begins to feel like a franchise restaurant. Reliable, polished, predictable, and deadening. The meal is never terrible. It is also never surprising.

For me, that is poison to adventure gaming.

An adventure should not feel like a customer service experience. It should not feel like the players are moving through a padded attraction where everything has been pre-measured to produce a stable, acceptable outcome—and that's exactly what the most popular modern RPG's feel like to me. Adventure is dangerous. It should feel strange. It should sometimes feel unfair in the way the world is unfair, not because the GM is cheating, but because the world is larger than the characters.

Ever watch the 80s D&D cartoon? A first-level party encountering an ancient dragon goddess is not automatically bad encounter design. In fact, try that shit in your game today and you'll be burned at the stake.

It is bad encounter design only if the party is expected to fight her.

If the point is to trick her, avoid her, bargain with her, distract her, manipulate her enemies, steal something from under her nose, or get out alive with their eyebrows still attached, then that encounter may be fantastic.

The problem is not danger.

The problem is false expectations.

Encounter Math Is a Tool, Not a Law

Challenge ratings and encounter-building math were valuable additions to RPG design. They give GMs guidance. They help prevent accidental slaughter. They help designers think through pacing, attrition, and expected resource use.

Used properly, they are useful tools.

But tools become traps when the table starts treating them as promises, or even straitjackets.

If every fight is assumed to be level-appropriate, then the players are being trained to fight everything. If the numbers imply that most obstacles are calibrated to their current capabilities, then the players stop scouting, negotiating, retreating, planning, tricking, and fearing the unknown.

They begin to trust the math more than the world.

That is when the narrative loses something vital.

In some modern systems, the numbers can feel wound so tightly that every character, regardless of class, build, or concept, seems to operate inside the same narrow band of expected success and failure. Attacks, skill checks, saves, and tactical options start to blur together. The characters may look different, but under the hood they feel like the same engines wearing different skins.

That may be balanced in the spreadsheet sense.

It is not necessarily adventurous.

Failure Is Part of the Game

A tabletop RPG that never involves fleeing from a fight is not balanced.

A tabletop RPG that never involves failing at an important task is not balanced.

A tabletop RPG where the players can predict too cleanly when they are likely to succeed or fail is not balanced.

It is managed.

Failure is not an interruption of adventure. Failure is one of the engines of adventure.

The locked door you cannot open forces you to find another way in. The monster you cannot defeat becomes a recurring terror. The noble you fail to persuade becomes an enemy. The bridge you cannot repair changes the route. The spell that goes wrong creates consequences no one planned for.

That is the good stuff.

Not every failure needs to be catastrophic. Not every danger needs to be lethal. But if the game is designed so that meaningful failure rarely happens, or is softened so quickly that it barely matters, then the adventure starts to feel fake.

The world should push back.

The Spotlight Is Not a Permanent Residence

One of the strangest assumptions in some balance conversations is that every character should be equally relevant in every kind of scene.

I do not agree.

Every player should matter over the course of play. Every player should have chances to act, choose, speak, risk, and shine. But that does not mean every character should be equally useful in every moment.

Sometimes the warrior owns the scene.

Sometimes the scholar owns the scene.

Sometimes the pilot, thief, engineer, priest, wizard, diplomat, scout, or absolute disaster goblin owns the scene.

That is not imbalance. That is rhythm.

The key is making sure the spotlight moves.

If one character dominates every situation, something has gone wrong. But if one character dominates one specific kind of situation because that is what they were built to do, that is not a crisis. That is payoff.

Let the tank tank.

Just make sure there is more to the adventure than a hallway.

The Loudest Voices Are Not Always the Table

Another reason “balance” has become such a distorted concept is that online conversation rewards outrage.

A relatively small number of very loud people can create the illusion of consensus. They dislike a rule, declare it “imbalanced,” and then repeat that claim loudly enough that designers begin to wonder if the entire audience agrees.

Sometimes the criticism is valid.

Often (especially online) it is not.

Designers should listen to feedback, but they should not let the angriest voices redesign the game by intimidation. Some people are not trying to improve the work. They are trying to vent, dominate, or punish. No amount of revision will satisfy them, because they are not satisfiable.

If you are a designer, protect your mental health. Take useful criticism seriously. Ignore abuse. Block people when necessary. There is no virtue in letting strangers verbally grind you down in the name of “community feedback.”

A game cannot be designed by fear.

Why Not Just Homebrew It?

There is always someone who says, “Well, just change the rules.”

Of course.

Everyone knows the GM can change rules. That is not the point.

The real question is whether a game is worth homebrewing in the first place.

I will gladly modify a system I like at its core. I will tune it, expand it, cut parts away, replace subsystems, and make it my own if the foundation excites me.

But I am not going to rebuild a system whose basic philosophy bores me.

Why would I?

If the core experience feels sterile, over-managed, or hostile to the kind of adventure I want, then the issue is not one rule. It is the design center of gravity. At that point, I would rather play something else—or build something else.

Which, in a very real sense, is why Shattered World exists.

What Balance Means in Shattered World

Shattered World is not designed around the idea that every situation should be safe, fair, symmetrical, or level-appropriate.

It is designed around the idea that adventure is dangerous, characters are different, choices have consequences, and the world is not obligated to meet the party on even footing.

That does not mean the game is arbitrary. It does not mean the GM should be cruel. It does not mean the rules do not matter.

It means balance is not the same thing as sameness.

Balance means players have meaningful ways to engage.

Balance means different characters matter in different situations.

Balance means danger is telegraphed enough that smart players can make smart choices.

Balance means combat is only one possible response to threat.

Balance means running away is sometimes the correct answer.

Balance means the world is allowed to be bigger than you.

And most importantly, balance means the adventure still has teeth.

Because once the teeth are gone, what exactly are we adventuring for?

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