System Balance in TTRPG Design

Balance seems to be a hot topic in Game Design. Various interaction in a game system might make a game feel unbalanced, such as when a player’s choices enable them to consistently roll with more dice, or deal more damage relative to the other players in the game.

But what does balancing a game really mean? Is it practical to make sure every little subsystem is ‘balanced’ to work alongside each other when misused, or better to focus on making the game work when it’s played as intended?

Those are questions that I’ve been aware of as I’ve been tackling my first game, Fight or Fright! While I don’t think I can answer those big questions about the nature of game design, I can tell you a bit about an issue I’m working on as I head towards the first full draft of the game.

Is Fright Useless?

Fight or Fright is a spooky Halloween game about kids who fight possessed decorations with their superpowered costumes, and it uses a shifting dual-dice pool system to represent the tensions the characters experience. The Fight pool is rolled when the characters act with their magically empowered costumes, and the Fright pool is rolled when the characters act more in line with who they are beneath the costumes.

If you’d like to read more about the game’s design, you can check out this page which collects all the design updates.

Fight is easy - using a superpower? Smashing a possessed decorative pumpkin? Roll your Fight dice pool! There are specific rules for dealing and resisting harm that involve a player rolling their dice pool. It’s a concrete system that has a clear use throughout play.

Fright, on the other hand? Not so easy. The question is, why would people want to roll with Fright? I often feel I’m struggling to come up with examples of when players would actually want to approach a situation with Fright.

There’s our imbalance. Fighting those decorations is a big pillar of this game, but so is the struggle of these characters themselves. They’re suddenly thrust to the centre of this crisis, and their own emotions and experiences are key to how they can make it through the night. Right now, the fighting side is the one that feels like it’s packing more of the punch, and the character-driven stuff feels like an afterthought.

I think I need to remedy this by designing a system that specifically uses the Fright dice pool, to mirror the fighting mechanics in some way. In the Master of Candies section of the book, the MC is advised to put challenges in front of the players that they don’t have to solve through Fighting. But players should probably be able to do something with Fright on their own.

Initially, I had a system for recovering wear-and-tear, the harm you take during the game, where you could roll Fright to help yourself or someone else recover. That mechanic actually was part of the playtest episode of the podcast, which you can listen to here:

I took it out because I wasn’t happy with the implementation, opting instead to allow players to spend a resource to recover. Maybe I was too quick to take it out!

Halloween costumes fall apart. Realistically, you’re fixing your outfit all through the night, or having someone help you put it back together! If I can make this mechanic more of a robust moment, maybe it can bring some more weight to the fright pool, at least from the player facing side.

I imagine it as a pause in the chaos, a connection between two people as they help each other out. Maybe, on a full success, you both recover some wear-and-tear! Or maybe you get to shift their dice, or affect them in some other way.

I feel like this could help bring the systems more inline with one another, and make the whole game feel more connected. I don’t want the Fright pool to feel like a negative thing, where players dreaded having dice move to that pool. Instead, I wanted it to feel like it unlocked more opportunities and approaches. Let’s see if I can get that to work!

A shorter design update this time! I’m trying to spend as much time as possible working on the game to try and get the public playtest out by the end of the year!

I hope you’re all having a great time working on, reading or playing TTRPGs. The next time you hear from me, the public playtest will be complete!

If you want to keep up with me in the meantime, you can follow me on Bluesky here.

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