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Balancing Your Party
24 Plays2 months ago
Whether you’re a GM striving for harmony or a player finding your niche, achieving balance can be the key to a memorable game. We break down the different ways to define balance, from party composition and individual capabilities to fitting challenges within encounters. Learn how to manage balance in both one-shots and campaigns, adjust as your game progresses, and make sure all players have a chance to shine.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
And you ask anybody on the Justice League, they'll tell you I am an invaluable member of this team. Okay. All right, Dasani. Lay it on me. Tell me what you can do, Mountain Valley Spring. Okay. I can communicate with every living creature living in our vast oceans. Okay. Talks to fish, Guy. Also... I'm gonna stop you right there, because I know your powers.
00:00:25
Speaker
It's talks to fish. The rest of the page is blank. For office use only. I have sonar. Yeah, for talking to fish. I have super hearing. Uh-huh. So you can listen to fish? I can breathe underwater. Because that's where the fish you talk to are? Night vision. So you can find the fish.
00:01:11
Speaker
All right, Ben. We're here. It is time for another episode. Hey, it's it's nice to be past the holiday shenanigans. We're back to some normal sessions, almost weekly, right?
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like everybody's schedule quiets down a little bit more and we can get to some real important gaming action these days. Oh, heck yeah. All right. Well, today we're going to try to not just balance our lives you know with good games. We're going to try to balance our games. That's an important game balance. It's a big topic, you guys. It's one of those things that people talk about a lot. We often judge systems by if it's balanced or not. if Do we have a good balance in this game?
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of times people talk about like is there enough balance in this party? Is this character better or worse than that character and so on feels like this has always been A part of my gaming experience maybe even more so with these newer editions. We'll get we'll get into that a little bit the history of balance and rpgs but like for now, we're going to talk real quick about some of the challenges of you know, what we're going to explore here today, some of the challenges of crafting your party with a semblance of balance and your game for that matter. What we're going to talk about includes not just parties amongst themselves and how the players might be balanced with respect to their characters, but also beyond party composition, thinking about the kinds of challenges and how to balance those challenges. We've talked about that a little bit in terms of encounter design, but I think we're really going to drill down today into something a little bit deeper.
00:02:46
Speaker
So let's talk about some ways we we can kind of find balance, I guess, and in the in what we're talking about here. I think there's at least three ways that we can talk about balance. One is in terms of the balance of the breadth of the party, the composition of the party, the capabilities that the party has. And so kind of the classic expression of this, if you want to think about D and&D, is the way they would have what they call kind of the four corners of the party. right it's It was classically, you'd have a wizard, a rogue, a fighter, and then a cleric. And if you had those characters, you had essentially everything that you might need.
00:03:19
Speaker
It was literally like covering all the basics. Some of the earlier Dungeons and Dragons games were tournament based. right no So they wanted to get to the tournament, you wanted to have a rounded party that could achieve all the different goals. So you needed the rogue, you need the wizard, you need the fighter, you need the cleric. That would fill out your party and round it out. Other games that's less necessary in some cases, but even in say a superhero game, you might have a brick and a blaster and a speedster and so on.
00:03:47
Speaker
and so okay That's the number one. It's the balance in terms of the breadth of the player's capabilities, the character's capabilities of the game. The second idea here would be the balance in terms of the capabilities of any one character relative to the other characters. okay Mark, I think we've got a ah particular offender here. It's Rifts. I love Rifts. yeah I love the world of Rifts. I loved the game it one of my primary games.
00:04:12
Speaker
But my goodness, that was a game where you could play this armored nine foot tall yeah gun wielding glitter boy, or you could play a super squishy, you know, city rat who had nothing and you could create parties that had both kinds of characters.
00:04:29
Speaker
vastly different but i'll say this you don't have to be playing riffs to have that experience though true i've seen games of dungeons and dragons where players who are vastly experienced at making powerful characters sit at the table with somebody who's just started and it's like you might as well be running around in that uh you know riffs battle armor yeah it's really more about the perception of the players how they perceive their character in relation to the other characters right Yeah, that's right. So that's ah that perception point is really important. I mean, there's there's math involved too, but like it's important that if the players are feeling like, hey, I'm falling behind the other characters here, that's going to be something you need to address. OK, the third type of balance we want to talk about is the fit between the PCs and the challenges that they're going to face in the encounters. yeah And we talked a bit about that in terms of encounter design before. We'll talk more about that today, but that's the third kind. is Essentially, I think of it as the fit between the world and the characters.
00:05:28
Speaker
So we have these different things that could create imbalance, things that we can observe as potentially being in balancing things. How do these come up in play? Like, how do we recognize this imbalance? Things could be imbalanced because it could be possible that the system is imbalanced. and so Well, you mentioned rifts. That would be a classic example for us. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, these guys, you know, what's funny is some people, when you say, oh, that's a bug, they go, no, that's a virtue. That's a feature.
00:05:55
Speaker
ah so yeah ah free rifts players out there that are ready to spam us and tell us how we're wrong about that yeah we get it rifts kind of built it itself that way intentionally and that's fine but the point is it could be a system thing it could also be that if you're thinking about the thing about player capabilities and the character capabilities and whether you've got the relevant breath you need it could be that the players have only focused on just their character. They haven't focused on what else is going on in the group. Yeah. Too many of one class maybe, or they're maybe they're they're they're not spreading out and getting all the skills. So that could be unknowingly creating an imbalance. Yeah. And I think you've seen this, Mark, where you can have parties that, again, I'll use D and&D for an example, but like
00:06:36
Speaker
Rather than the fighter rogue wizard cleric, you'll have a druid, a paladin, ah and I sweat a little bit more as a DM if I'm not really confident about what what player's capabilities are like.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. If you're in ever playing games like pickup games and things like that, you never know what you're going to get. Yeah. And, and balance could even happen by the level of skills of some in creativity of some players in relation to the other players. So that could create vast gaps. Um, I talked a little bit about that, you know, how you know players can maybe make really powerful characters in like Shadowrun or,
00:07:15
Speaker
Or maybe they're playing Dungeons and Dragons. Pathfinder is a typical example here, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And the they chasm between the the inexperienced player and the experienced player could be massive. What else we got? We got encounter designs. Yeah, we talked a little bit about this when we talked about encounter design. And I think you and I both have cases where we've kind of overshot and it turns out we put up an encounter that was a little too tough for the party. And I'm sure there's also cases where we've undershot. Encounter that you thought was going to be important or interesting turned out to be something they walked through pretty easily.
00:07:50
Speaker
What's interesting about those cases is that in this discussion, we're really focused on the party's capabilities. And so a big part of encounter balance is going to also be how well you understand what the party can do.
00:08:03
Speaker
I can think of one other way I've thrown my games out of balance before. I'm sure you have. I'm sure every GM has. I know this happened a lot around the introduction of 5e really. Oh my gosh. I've thrown out items in the game that I did not realize were that powerful. Oh man. When 5e first came out, if you started handing out armor and rings of protection and things like that that had a lot higher capability, you learned pretty fast that This didn't scale the same way that earlier editions did. It wasn't linear. You know what's funny too? Just a quick side note on that. is It doesn't even have to be the items powerful. It could be that you've got an exceptionally creative player who can do stuff with an immovable rod or who can do stuff with a jar of smoke. or there's like ah Isn't there like a jar that can like always pour out water and pretty soon you've got like a hydrologist on your party?
00:08:49
Speaker
you know Yeah, I mean, creative players can really, they're just going to rise to the occasion anyway. doesn't you know It's a good problem to have. It's a great problem to have. So we've identified some of the ways ah games can become imbalanced. Let's take a little break here from that. We'll come back to it. Okay. What about the history of balance and RPGs? Those early games were not balanced. Not at all.
00:09:15
Speaker
Well, and I think it's interesting that we had this expectation at any point that these needed to be balanced. Like why do we think games should be balanced in the first place? I have a culprit. I'm going to throw it out there. All right. i I really think a lot of this has to do with like World of Warcraft MMOs. I think somewhere along the line, these kind of other games and experiences came in.
00:09:37
Speaker
where balance was very important. You know, if you weren't happy with your character in World of Warcraft, you'd have to wait for the next patch, you know, where they would balance things out. I kind of felt like third edition came out around the same time, and fifth edition came out after, and when fifth came out,
00:09:56
Speaker
it was really balanced. like There was a definite concerted effort to make the parody feel feel right so that anybody could feel like they could jump into character and feel like they were as vital to that group as anybody else. Yeah, I think that to the extent that people looked at these as games and they looked at the systems and the mechanical elements of these things and said, okay, well, that should function like a game. In a game, there shouldn't be only one winning strategy.
00:10:23
Speaker
right like It shouldn't be that in order to win at this game, the only character you would ever take would be a fighter or a Jedi or a take your pick, you know? when you looked at what RPGs could do because they were very open-ended and they had a GM who was administrating that stuff, there was always this kind of expectation. And I think this fits in with that point about house rules we made a while back. You know you remember we talked about how house rules back in those earlier editions, everybody was kind of expected to do it. I think the point was that was supposed to kind of serve balance or serve the sense of fun and things like that.
00:10:56
Speaker
I mean, there were early games, we would balance it in all sorts of different ways. Rules, like you say, it was B1. Items was a way to, you know, kind of balance these out. The tourist scene in those early games, and out remember, like, did you ever play a wizard? ah Like, it was one through four. I remember the first time I played a wizard back in those early editions and I was like, how does anybody even survive this?
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah. And then you were supposed to get to the end of the game. And at the end of the game, you were now the one who was overly balanced. It was, you were the the master of the domain. Whereas earlier it was definitely not you.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean for those that maybe don't remember this or haven't played those earlier editions, if you were a first level wizard in older editions at D and&D, there were no cantrips, there were no spells you could cast as many times as you liked. Maybe three to four casts of a spell and you were now hiding behind those people swinging weapons.
00:11:48
Speaker
Right. And you had very few hit points. So yeah you'd be crushed if you were not careful. 1d4. Yeah. d4 hit dice. So you were it was bad. So the point is, but then your point was like, over time that shifted, right? If you ended up being a 10th level wizard,
00:12:03
Speaker
it could drop meteors on people and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, balance is an interestingly kind of fraught topic and I think they've overcorrected in some games. I think in other games they've said, hey, we don't even care. As I said, I think the Platinum games are interesting in that case. Part of the really interesting question to ask ourselves is, what do we expect of balance?
00:12:24
Speaker
Let's talk about balance in kind of two perspectives. We got one, which is the player's perspective, but we also have a GM's perspective. let's Let's talk real quick about the player's perspective. So when players think something's out of balance, what are they looking at?
00:12:38
Speaker
damage output might be the number one thing. Am I doing as much damage in relation to my friend across the table? Could maybe be my durability. Do I have the ability to protect myself? For a mage, that could be your armor spells. Do you have the ability to get out of combat if I need to? But there's also things like, am I utilized well? What's my utility in the group? Do I have versatile abilities that even if I'm not doing the most damage in the group, make me feel like I'm still contributing something significant?
00:13:06
Speaker
And I know for a fact, Ben, you've had situations where you felt like you had a character that just didn't feel very utilized out of combat. Uh, I've got a monk who I didn't give him any real out of combat skills. He doesn't have any special lore or history or religion or anything that would make him in nature. Nothing really that's useful. It's always, always it's an, it's an to get into combat.
00:13:28
Speaker
I guess this guy doesn't know what I was thinking. He doesn't know what to do at this time. Yeah. So players can sense imbalance from combat. They can sense imbalance from maybe not having non-combat contributions to make.
00:13:41
Speaker
ah There's also another thing which is kind of this social element in terms of screen time. you know Social characters especially, this will be important, but essentially any time where the player gets a chance to play their character, gets to have a little spotlight time, that's a thing that can also play a role in balance. If you've got some characters that are always in that limelight and other characters are just never there, part of that is you as a GM need to engage those players, and we talked about engagement, but yeah that's another way in which players can feel it's unbalanced.
00:14:09
Speaker
We also have the GM side of things. The GM would think about all those things that the player is. They need, they should be thinking about all those things because that's in the player's mind. So on top of that, they're also thinking of things like story compatibility. Does the party's balance allow me to run the type of story that I want to run? So, you know, example could be, you gotta maybe a party that's just laden with a lot of melee characters, you know? Right.
00:14:36
Speaker
Am I going to... Not much in the way of spell casting or something. Well, maybe they just don't have the skills. ah Because that might become into more combat design. But let's say they don't have the skills to push the story in the direction as you like. Maybe they don't have a lot of knowledge about history. So now I can't engage them on some of the history of the world. I'm i'm being cut off some some of the avenues to which I am accustomed to telling a story.
00:15:01
Speaker
So that story compatibility may not be there with a group that doesn't have any relevant skills that will facilitate that. But then you also have combat design and I've seen this at the table for the first time actually in the game I've been running. You're in it Ben. Okay. It's a very combat heavy game and there's no room sweepers.
00:15:20
Speaker
There's no fireball. yeah There's no chain lightning. There's no thing that does crowd control. So what this interesting I found out does, I can't really run those types of combats which have these big scale, like lots of mobs come in because they'll just take forever. Because they have to be addressed individually. I've got to fight this one and that one went after it. So that's changed a little bit of what I could do narratively as a GM in in the realm of combat.
00:15:49
Speaker
I also think if you're a GM and you're thinking about different kinds of ways in which the imbalances have implications for you, does it also support the kind of pace that you want in your game? You know, if you've got characters that take a lot of transaction time and each one of them does, you might get bogged down in certain ways. So there's a lot with respect to how you tell stories, what kinds of combats you can do, what kinds of actions the party can take that plays a big role in how the time at the table gets spent.
00:16:17
Speaker
And if all of that ultimately comes out to, hey, this wasn't a lot of fun, then you may need to do some tweaking. Can I give a quick this example of what you're talking about with pacing for the audience? I'm thinking of ah one would be like a summoner, maybe. Okay. If you got a table that takes a long time in combat and now somebody's got a summoner and he's got six creatures, he's got to resolve their combat, that could ruin the pacing of your adventure. So maybe that's something you need to consider, or maybe you got too many bards and they all want to They all want that face time. So just those kind of classes and things could slow things down for pacing wise.
00:16:55
Speaker
Okay, so we've talked about different ways of defining balance and how that imbalance might come or about. We've talked about a bit of the history and some of the backstory on balance and why we even care about it or how different systems kind of evolved in terms of balance. We've talked about what imbalance looks like from the player's perspective and from the GM's perspective and Mark. Let's get to it. How do we then fix all this? What do we do when our system is unbalanced?
00:17:20
Speaker
Well, first of all, yeah, yeah. Ask he yourself, should it be, should it be unbalanced, you know, or should it be balanced? You know, like if you're playing like that wrist, like you were saying, maybe you don't need to, if the goal of a balanced game is that everybody's having a good time, then if they're having a good time, it doesn't matter. That's a really good note. Actually, it's worth really like.
00:17:38
Speaker
parking on for a second. Yeah. The golden rule here is fun. I know this actually is the case with some board games and I'm thinking here about like talisman. I have a great time playing talisman. It is a bonkers unbalanced game and you never know what's going to happen.
00:17:52
Speaker
crazy things happen, prophetess for the win characters. That's right. So anyways, RPGs could be like that too. So think about whether or not it should be balanced. Yeah. And, um, some games so that's okay. So if you want to balance it, what are the tools that we would use? Like yeah I had mentioned earlier that like, sometimes if I realize there's an imbalance with combat where somebody's maybe not doing as much.
00:18:17
Speaker
a simple item could maybe resolve that. Maybe get that one person a certain item that might get them up a little bit more in parity with the others, make them feel a little bit more included in those combats.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's really fantastic. That's a very easy, quick thing to give because a lot of times in fantasy games, and I'm thinking about D and&D especially, um items are very much coded to certain classes or certain kinds of characters. So that's a really good note. The other thing that we've seen a lot in more recent times is the evolution of what we could call meta currencies. What is a meta currency? Yeah, that's a big word. All right. so So these are in games where you might have hero action points, inspiration, resolve. There's a lot of different terms for this, but they might be things that let you reroll a dice or they might be things that let you change something in the scene, or they might be something that let you come back from the edge of death, or it could be lots of different things. But this is something we're seeing in a lot of games, and that's one of the great tools that you could have. And if you don't have it in your system, it's actually something you could just introduce. You could houserule up your own action currency that gives the players extra capability. um I want to highlight for special consideration here, special ah merit, our old buddy, Len Pimentel, who wrote into Prowlers and Paragons this concept of resolve.
00:19:36
Speaker
And the meta currency in that game is cool because if your character doesn't have the top level stats, um you get more resolve. So this is kind of like how Batman keeps up with Superman in those kinds of games, right? Is that Batman doesn't have the most strength, he doesn't have as much strength as Superman, but he's got this great meta currency that gives him some dramatic opportunities.
00:19:54
Speaker
And Aquaman could talk to some fish. That's right. Aquaman, I'm sure, has some more resolve. So with that in mind, Mark, these are some different things we talked about, thinking about whether it should be balanced, metacurrencies. You've got a list of great practical tips here, so why don't you hit us with that and let us know what's up. Yeah, let's go through a few of these quickly. Be transparent with your intentions. you know Let people know what type of game you're going to be running. And that might help you out with not only with the character design when people are making their characters, people will now kind of know what's what the object of the game is and make characters accordingly.
00:20:31
Speaker
address Address inequities as you see them. Do this early. If you see something that's a little out of whack, try to address it so it doesn't get out of hand. Listen to your players. Value their input. If a player tells you they're not happy about something, listen to them. They might be wrong. No, but you've got to listen to them and you've got to understand where they're coming from and why they feel like there's an inequity.
00:20:57
Speaker
Adapt. We're GMs. We have to adapt all the time. So just be prepared to adapt on the fly. Yeah, like right in the moment I think is the idea here, right? We talked in some ways about the encounters and stuff and like how you can just not have the other guys come through that door or you could have some guys come through that door.
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah, balance your encounters on the fly. fly Okay, and then number five. yeah Sharing your spotlight. Sharing the spotlight, make sure everybody gets a chance to shine. This is probably the most important balancing thing. I would say of almost all the rules is you want to make everybody at the table feel included. You got to be a good host. I've been at the table bed with her very shy players. It's important that you give those shy players as much time as the players who are flamboyant.
00:21:40
Speaker
right Really, one of one of the great tricks you could do as a GM or as just as a player really is you want to get your players to help you achieve these goals of balance.
00:21:53
Speaker
particularly that one where you're sharing the spotlight. Other players should be recognizing that that one player who's quiet and try to include them. If you're not playing with randos, if you're playing with kind of regular players week to week, these are people that also want to play with each other. And so they will help you when it comes to, Hey, you know, let's make sure that so-and-so has a moment here to shine. What would you like to do? Or I think this is your moment to press the switch or whatever it might be.
00:22:19
Speaker
That being said, I have pulled players aside who have been really ah charismatic and flamboyant and maybe making a lot of it about them in a sense. I've pulled them aside and say, I love what you're doing. I think you're you're doing awesome things for your character. Can you bring some of the other players in to what you're doing? I think it's fantastic. And they they usually respond quite excited about that.
00:22:41
Speaker
Well, it gives them a little bit of a leadership role and that's always it's always great. Ben, you run a lot of one shots versus campaigns and tell me a little bit how like balancing one shots is so different than the campaign real quick.
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, so convention games are a common example of this or sample games, demo games you might want to run at your local game store. There's a lot that goes into a one-shot game, but the thing about a one-shot game is right there in the title, you've only got that block of time. And let's just say, for example, it's four hours. You've only got that four hour block to make everything happen in that block of time, which means every role needs to shine in that limited time frame that you've got. So if you're doing a one shot, a lot of times that's not something where people are going to have spent the time to make characters for that one shot because they're not going to be playing them over a long term. so You might not even trust people to bring made characters because they could be they could be wildly different.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, and also you don't know if they're going to fit the story. So if I'm doing a one shot, I'm almost always going to present those characters. And that means that I can establish balance between the encounters and the capabilities of the party and the breadth of the party's capabilities relative to each other. I can do all that stuff.
00:23:53
Speaker
ahead of time so that then when I hand out the characters they can pick and choose they can assemble that party within the parameters I've set that I'm confident about and then the trick is making sure everybody's got a moment for that character to shine and if you've done a good job with a one-shot you'll have those moments for every character in that game when the moment comes up you can look at that player and if they haven't done anything before then you can go now is your moment So that's how I tend to try to keep one shots balanced and achieve everything I need to achieve within that four hour block. Mark, when we've got more time, when we're doing a campaign week over week, how do we think about balance in those cases? What are some of our campaign level balance options?
00:24:34
Speaker
You know, characters grow and they level throughout the course of a game. So you're going to see moments where if you're looking at a graph where players are spiking all over to place and some are gaining more power than others, it could just be introduction of an item or something like that.
00:24:52
Speaker
So you're gonna be watching that and keeping your eye on those players to see who might be pulling too far ahead, who's lagging too far behind. You're gonna wanna try to keep these ah interesting journey together. With the one shot, of course, with pre-generated characters,
00:25:08
Speaker
They're not going to change and grow over time, but here you've got an ongoing task to do, which it's cool because on the one hand, as you're saying, they're going to grow and change and they could start to pull apart from each other in terms of their capability. But at the same time, you've got also time to adjust and to make those changes you need.
00:25:24
Speaker
These imbalances, if they're unattended, only become more apparent as the game progresses. So you have to make adjustments, micro adjustments on the fly all the time. You're going to need to adapt your encounters. You're going to want to create that balance within that story as the campaign progresses. The camping is a living, breathing thing and it needs to be attended to all the time. it's it's Think of it as a garden, you know? Yeah, you need to maintain lots of things periodically and keep everything in balance. Okay, well, so Balance in tabletop RPGs. We've covered it in a lot of different ways. We've talked about it in a lot of different ways. As you can see, it's kind of not just one thing. It's a kind of a multi-dimensional thing that we're trying to do. The end of this discussion really is just to say that, look, as always, listen to your party. Listen to your group. Listen to the people who are having fun. cause
00:26:11
Speaker
I'll just reiterate that point we made earlier. That's the golden rule, right? Balance is whatever is serving the objective of fun in your game. And it could be that sort of what would otherwise be wildly imbalanced is a great solution for you. So wrapping up here with our final thoughts on balance and tabletop RPGs. Hey, you know, we don't know what your table's like.
00:26:31
Speaker
Just be thoughtful. Hopefully some of these things will trigger some ideas in your mind about what you can do to make your game balanced for your players because it is important. It's important to those players or some of them maybe, maybe not for everybody. And because it's a multidimensional thing, it may be that you can strike a balance where some characters are doing more in combat, some characters are getting more screen time, other characters have great utility and are contributing things that are not combat related. And it may be that you can strike a balance between all that stuff in ways that your players like.
00:27:06
Speaker
Here is our tune-up segment request. We have someone who wrote in and said, hey, I've seen DMs run, quote, unquote, casino sessions where they appear to make up a card or a dice game that fits the era in the party storyline, essentially on the fly. How might I give my players a chance to battle on the bays when the opportunity arises? Mark, I had to look up the word bays. What does that mean? I was looking at that going, what is a bays? I don't have no idea.
00:27:31
Speaker
So a base, I guess, is the that kind of felt surface that you play on in Vegas or on a poker table or whatever. That's that's that's a base. That's what they call that, I guess. All right. Well, the battle and the base. I mean, why can't you just play a real card game? I guess is one thing I would think. Well, I think this is a little bit like the complaint some players have with riddles and game puzzles where they're like, look, my character has got a high intelligence. I do not.
00:27:59
Speaker
or my character have may have a better card skill than I have. So I think if you're going to do essentially these kinds of gambling situations or games of chance, yeah things like that in a game, first of all, they are great. It is one of the great moments in any James Bond movie where he is sitting there, you know, Dealing cards with ah the the arch bad guy, you know, and there's all kinds of discussion happening and they're they're talking to each other and you know You remember mark when you were talking earlier about having your villains be in places where you can't just go jump them You've got to actually sit there and talk trash to him and stuff like that
00:28:32
Speaker
yeah So this is a place where you can do that kind of thing is in this casino setting. ah And what's great about it is that these are happening in every kind of genre we've got. You've got fantasy casino type things, you've got modern day of course, you've got sci-fi casinos and so on. yeah I think the trick with this is if you want to give your players something fun that will also respect the fact that their characters are very capable,
00:28:55
Speaker
You wanna come up with whatever a game of chance is gonna be, probably with the dice that you got at the table and with some kind of skill or modifier or something based on the capabilities of the characters. You know, one thing that I'm thinking about just, you know, as you're talking, I would think making them roll multiple times would be important. you I wouldn't say making them roll. I mean, just make it layered is what i'm what I'm thinking of. Right. Because, like, if you just have them roll once and say, oh, make a gambling check. Not not very exciting, huh? Yeah. but if you have like multiple levels, like maybe when there's modifiers between the different levels, maybe you're moving up, showing that they're moving up to a tougher table with people who can play cards better or more skilled. Yeah, talk about a great moment to introduce memorable NPCs. Yeah, you can bring in an NPC that could really all of a sudden, you know, you get moved up to the table with the other card sharks, and now you can really start having some fun. Maybe you have the other players roll, like they're at the table with them.
00:29:51
Speaker
Remember that the stakes in these kinds of gambling situations should quickly run into something that's significant to the players. If they don't win or lose more than a couple bucks, essentially, then that'll be fine. It's a neat distraction for a moment. You can say you had the experience, but what happens if, uh, one of them says, Hey, uh, you look like you're down a few bucks. Uh, how about you bet that Starship? Oh yeah. That's a lot of fun. Yeah. Or I really liked that, uh, family heirloom you got there, that sword.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. Is that your father's watch ah that you got there? And now you can start getting into some fun with maybe there's some other things going on. s Slide of hands. Don't feel bad about cheating. Yeah. Make it multi-level though. Don't just make it one roll. Yeah. Give it, give it layers and make those layers each one exciting.
00:30:36
Speaker
Well, I like the idea of those layers being a little bit of like, hey, tell a story with this. I've done these kinds of encounters where I told it in like a few different steps. I said, all right, at the beginning of the night, let's roll and see how you guys all do. And then they all kind of rolled. And then it was like, all right, well, this is how things are progressing for about the first hour or so of your card game or whatever it was. Let's roll again and see how things are going kind of in the middle. And what's fun is that you could bring in things like, oh, you know, in these middle sections, people are starting to cheat a little more or you know, maybe you made an enemy out of that one NPC and he might try to catch up with you later. Or when you get down to the end stages, the very last set of roles you're going to do right now, it's getting for real. Be fun with it though. Have fun and and be dynamic. Like if you have a ah character in the party who's the lucky halfling who has the trait yeah and that lucky halfling says, Oh, I'll kiss the dice for good luck.
00:31:25
Speaker
and you roll a one, why don't we roll it? How's wrong with it? That's fantastic. Yeah, I love the idea of using not just the villains cheating, but like weirdly, it might seem encouraging the players to do that too. you know What kind of dirty underhanded tricks will your artificer bring to a craps table? One other the thing to do as well, and we I think we've kind of alluded to this a little bit, is don't overlook that the characters in these kinds of settings are also going to be playing the psychology of these NPCs. So spending a little time developing that psychology,
00:31:55
Speaker
you know, do these NPCs have tells? Are they getting frustrated or easily? There's all kinds of stuff like that. And I've had some games where I said, okay, look, the base stat for this could be decks, if you're going to try to cheat, or it could be your social skill or your, you know, your intelligence, if you want to try to count cards maybe, or if you want to try to psych out the players that you play. So I think there's a lot of fun to be had if you start thinking more broadly than just the mechanics of the game.
00:32:21
Speaker
can i Can I also make one suggestion too? is And that's just to be somewhat definitive of what the role that you need to make is. yeah And I say that because games are very definitive, particularly like card games or dice games. they're You're going to have the result right there. It's going to be black and white. You won or you lost with a card game. Even if that's an opposed role too, right? yeah You could say something like, well, you need to hit a static number of 10. And that's very clear. Or you could say you need to beat that guy.
00:32:47
Speaker
Yes. So like be very clear about what the definition of what victory is. Don't be wishy washy where you're like looking at that ice going, well, I think you did it enough. Like that's not going to suffice for the players. They want to know if they would or lost.
00:33:02
Speaker
Well, friends, I think that's our tune-up segment for this week. We are going to be back next week with another episode of Tabletop Tune-Up. We hope, in the meantime, if you have your insights and thoughts about how to balance your party and your game, you'll share them with us at TabletopTuneUp at gmail dot.com. And send us your tune-up requests as well, any kind of idea, character, how to do something in a game, how to manage your table.
00:33:24
Speaker
We're excited to talk to you in either that email, tabletop, tune up at Gmail, or drop us a comment in one of our YouTube pages. Thanks again. Until then, keep this ice rolling.
00:34:13
Speaker
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00:34:54
Speaker
I'm not your tuna