What's balancing?

[Anderas]

After playing Zombicide BP in the summer, and playing Conan some weeks ago, both of which are balanced in a way that both parties have roughly equal chances to wipe the other one from the table, i was just keeping thinking about it. Zombicide is designed to be the fast arcade game for an evening "inbetween".

In Zombicide, it's the board game that can wipe you out, and if you do well and find the right stuff at the right time, you can clean out the board quite neatly as well.
Conan as well is a game that is roughly balanced; at least it is marked "easy", "medium" and "difficult" - whereas i might at least imagine how you could do a progression system there.

So here we have "balanced" games, but clearly they do something in those games that is not the intention of Heroquest. The progression system wouldn't work if both sides have equal strength.
Me, i am on the role play gamer side.

So what about balancing now? What's that for Heroquest?
I would say, a game like Conan or Zombicide is too hard for Heroquest. If you lose half your heroes each time, it breaks a lot, including motivation.
Same happens if you play the maze all over again and again - that's just boring.

The point is: "i would say". It's absolutely personal.
Of course you may have a different opinion. If you meet only once in half a year, an equipment progression system might just be the wrong way to go. If no-one remembers his heroe, you don't build up a narrative, and without the narrative, any progression is quite pointless. Then, for you, balancing like in Conan might just be the right way to go.

So in the end, balancing is about getting the difficulty under your personal control. And that's a form of art.

I don't want two things to happen:
* I don't want to have the result of the game narrowed down to the point that everyone can see in the beginning how it ends. I remember playing the settlers boardgame so often that in the end i could say from a glance on the starting positions who would likely win. I stopped playing the game because of that.
* At the same time i don't want it to be too randomly, because then i effectively lose the control.
* I don't want to mis-estimate to a point that I crash my hero group into a wall, or giving them a walk in the park.

To make it not too easy, my personal goal is to have base game compatibility. I want to be able to reuse the most basic models even in the late game. That's a hard one: I never played kellar's keep and i just had a short glance on the ogre hordes before i died, but i can't fight the impression that the game itself is not necessarily always base game compatible.

I did my four color questbook only to allow the heroes to progress as they like and it would still stay interesting.
There shall always be the threat, sometimes there should be someone dying so that they never feel safe; but then... that's it - well, that's it, for me.

The real point is:
Once you have the difficulty under control, you can do with it what you want.
You can harden the game to the point that only one or two heroes survive, if that's what your group likes.
You can soften it down to a point that leaves a small threat, but the real attention goes to the carefully planned special event in the quest. My opinion, those special events are what keeps a player group addicted.
Or you go the medium way if you don't have too many equipment items in your variant, so that someone dies regularly and has to re-buy from the beginning... just care that it is not always the wizard please.

So that's balancing:
Control the difficulty to your liking, without having accidents in the one or the other direction.

I think that Mohawk's Questimator does a solid job in estimating the basic and medium elaborate monsters. It gives you the result with a variance that leaves sufficient room for speculation if you win or lose: The variance is typically 50% of the complete result. So if you plan a quest that cost 15 life points of your group, you don't know if it will be 7 or 23 life points in reality... and 23 is quite a killer quest.
It is then the proper task of the quest planner to estimate all the magic and special events and special traps that he puts into the dungeon, and calculate it on top of the Questimator value or discount it from there.

[Goblin-King]

One thing that makes balance difficult is if you want progression as well.
If the strength of one side keeps increasing the other side has to increase in strength as well - aka power creep.
This leads to a constant need for balance calibration.

That's one of the reasons why I only play vanilla.
If I start introducing +5 armor of magic resistance and 6 dice Hellslayer sword, then I also need to add fireball throwing dragonlings and minor demons.
If on the other hand I know what a maxed out hero looks like, I can easier balance the game around that.

Since a hero can die and the player in principle has to start all over it's also better if the road to maxed out isn't too long.
It's not really a good idea to go naked into the lair of the wizards of Morcar...
I think with the original 3 quest-books, the balance was pretty good.

[knightkrawler]

It is very difficult, but as opposed to Goblin-King I embrace the possibilities it gives me.
Deconstructing both the vanilla rules and the original quests and rebuilding them around strengths eliminating weaknesses
and making everything modular (not talking about quest maps using tiles here, but the cross-referencing of rules and quests and cards) along the way
made it possible for me to one glorious day write a supplement "Morcar Compendium" that rather than giving the EWP strict rules introduces a collection of measures to make make every quest I write easier or more difficult.

As those who have read my questbooks know, I give a number of villains in the introduction along with the number of the villain represented the most in the quest: "21 (12 Skeletons)"
In the Morcar Compendium I could therefore recommend something like "If the sum of all four heroes' attack dice starting this quest exceeds 14, then set up half of the quest-typical villain type and a fifth of the overall number of villains given in the quest introduction in addition to those numbers. Set these up as regular villains or set up one of them per turn in the area the heroes start the quest in."
Language to be improved of course, but for the above example it means an additional 6 Skeletons and 4 other villains in addition to the 21 villains the quest originally has in the case of, for instance, the Wizard having 2AD, the Elf 4AD, the Dwarf 4AD, the Barbarian 5AD.
Another formula for 11 to 13 AD, maybe a formula using a stat other than attack dice...

But you get my gist, I hope. Sorry, this post is a mess, but the idea came writing it down, basically.
As a sidenote, after the next two questbooks, based on Kellar's Keep, I plan on writing a Heroes' Compendium, introducing new special rules and cards for each hero type that can be bought. With coinage, not with experience points or anything further complicating the rules. Along with the guidelines of the Morcar Compendium and some level of experience and empathy on Morcar's side, this should make for every questpack I write being balanceable to the heroes' previous success.

[whitebeard]

One thing that makes balance difficult is if you want progression as well.
If the strength of one side keeps increasing the other side has to increase in strength as well - aka power creep.
This leads to a constant need for balance calibration.

That's one of the reasons why I only play vanilla.
If I start introducing +5 armor of magic resistance and 6 dice Hellslayer sword, then I also need to add fireball throwing dragonlings and minor demons.
If on the other hand I know what a maxed out hero looks like, I can easier balance the game around that.

Since a hero can die and the player in principle has to start all over it's also better if the road to maxed out isn't too long.
It's not really a good idea to go naked into the lair of the wizards of Morcar...
I think with the original 3 quest-books, the balance was pretty good.

I second this approach. Once the heroes are maxed out on equipment even killing them does not reset the player... the other heroes collect the equipment and give it to the next guy. I use Rust, theft, and disposable artifacts to keep my players always looking for more. My quests are "balanced" for "champions" using the vanilla rules.

My "expanded armory" does next to nothing (Great Sword = diagonal battle axe for only, Elven Bow for elf extra attack at a huge price, Dwarven Axe can divide 4AD for multiple attacks) and you cannot buy these weapons, only find them. I do however have a bunch of spell enhancement artifact cards to make the wizard more fun later in the game.

My quests usually use some kind of mechanic where if you play it wrong, you will have a really tough time and likely die or fail the quest.
- You didn't search for secret doors in room 2, good luck later on.
- You used water of healing, but the sage told you you would need it to put out the wizard's magical fires!!
- You split-up after killing the dragon to search the treasure hoard. Did all of the goblin arrows the soldier skeletons not suggest something to you?
- You opened the barred door, that's okay. But you were also told that this door could be re-locked as an action on a later turn, and instead you gave up ground to the re-spawning undead host behind it? Good luck now!
- Your mission was to "protect the priests," so why did you leave him behind and run off to get your weapons?

These features bias the quest in the favor of the players (e.g. typical level of difficulty) if they are smart or in favor of EWP if they are not (at least one of you is guaranteed to die!). Another important point here is for the players to later understand how screwed they would be if they had not done the right thing earlier.