So what are those other aspects to consider? Making sure to have equal starting positions is important for fairness. Having multiple of viable strategies makes the game more interesting and replayable. But what about intenseness, immersion?
Consider a traveling merchant game situation where a player has 2 road choices to a single destination, but either way player would have to role a dice and in the case of 1 or 2 bandits would attack the player and kill him. Suppose the game would be otherwise equal for all players, now what's wrong here (we assume that there were no mechanics to reduce the risk in any way)?
Well, firstly the inevitable death of the player, unless he simply stays in some safe city for the whole game. That however is quite a boring option.
Secondly if you transfer this situation into a story it would sound something like: "Merchant Toby set out with his caravan on a journey to the eastern cities were riches awaited for him. During the journey he came across a crossing and could choose if he'd take the hilly road or the road by the river. They both lead to his destination so he chose to take the road by the river. But oh god he got attacked by bandits and they killed him. In his last thoughts he figured that the same would have happened if he had taken the hilly road. The end."
I think we can all agree it is a pretty horrible story. Throughout play-testing my last game Pactio I often went the path of seeing how some game interaction would be transferred to a story, helping me decide if the game was immersive enough, and that it didn't contain some awkward interactions.
Now suppose we improve upon that. That instead of always having the same 1/3 chance of dying you would instead draw and reveal a bandit card, where it shows the odds for each roads. Moreover you could pay scouts some money to see the next card. Then you could also invest a bigger amount of money to hire caravan guards, so that when you do get attacked by bandits you have 4/6 chance to drive them off for example.
This leads to a much interesting story, where a merchant would die because he was too greedy to pay the scouts some coin, or live because he chose to spend some money to protect himself or earn riches cos he took a great risk and he got lucky.
So we fixed immersion quite a bit, but a game where you have a chance to die in the first turns is not really enjoyable. A game where you struggle and make all the tactics in the world to still have a relatively high chance of simply losing and going out of the game might have some sort experimental value, but won't be something people would want to play, at least not for a second time.
Now the easiest solution would of course be that you take out dying and replace it with losing some gold. If you lost all the gold then for the game's purposes it's same as dying. However I think something more resolute would be more interesting from a game design perspective.
However it is important to give players a solid chance of survival. Suppose the game lasted for 10 turns, each turn involving going from 1 city to another meaning risking your life 10 times. If the survival for each turn was 2/3, then the chance to survive the game is 1.7 %. In the case of 5/6 (only rolling 1 is deadly) the survival chance is 16 %. If you hired guards starting from the third turn and bandits attacked you with a 1/6 chance your chance of survival would be 27%, still way too low.
So when designing that aspect of the game we should start by setting the goal of what the odds of total survival should be. I'd suggest 97-99 % for a solid safe strategy, 75-95% for a occasional risk taker, and only most reckless daredevils chance of survival would drop below that to below 50% and so on to a almost certain death.
First of all we would have to lose the 6 sided dice and replace it with a 20 sided dice, as that would give us more accuracy when giving odds. Secondly, suppose the story went that players are the pioneers of making those trade routes, and bandits don't start to show up before players have totally earned a certain amount of gold. Then you could have multiple of bandit decks representing different densities of bandits, each one used once the players' total power level has achieved a certain amount. Then we'd like to set the amount so that in an average game the first deck would come into play on third turn, second on sixth turn and third one on ninth turn.
Secondly we could give certain characteristics to each of those decks. For example the easy deck would always have 2-3 roads with 0 risk, and max risk would be no bigger than 3/20. The medium deck would always have a single safe road and max risk would be 5/20. The high risk deck would have an average risk of 5/20, so you would have to hire guards to decrease your risk. So that if you wanted to play safer in the late game you could invest into guards. Also the more you invest into them the higher your chances for survival are.
This leads to safer merchants being able to go through the first 5 turns with 0 risk, and then with the implementation of guards and scouts could play through with risking as little as possible.
So now the rules have transformed the game into something which tells a meaningful story. Some merchants take knowingly risks for a chance to win the game, while others prefer to play a steady but safe game.
So to sum things up, when balancing a game, one needs to keep their eye not only player vs. player fairness, but also player vs. game and some parts of game vs. other parts of game balance to keep the game interesting and intense. Also the story balance is important, as this is the immersion part of the game. When tweaking numbers try to understand the meaning behind the numbers and feel the story it creates at the end. Good understanding of combinatorics is really important for that.
Consider a traveling merchant game situation where a player has 2 road choices to a single destination, but either way player would have to role a dice and in the case of 1 or 2 bandits would attack the player and kill him. Suppose the game would be otherwise equal for all players, now what's wrong here (we assume that there were no mechanics to reduce the risk in any way)?
Well, firstly the inevitable death of the player, unless he simply stays in some safe city for the whole game. That however is quite a boring option.
Secondly if you transfer this situation into a story it would sound something like: "Merchant Toby set out with his caravan on a journey to the eastern cities were riches awaited for him. During the journey he came across a crossing and could choose if he'd take the hilly road or the road by the river. They both lead to his destination so he chose to take the road by the river. But oh god he got attacked by bandits and they killed him. In his last thoughts he figured that the same would have happened if he had taken the hilly road. The end."
I think we can all agree it is a pretty horrible story. Throughout play-testing my last game Pactio I often went the path of seeing how some game interaction would be transferred to a story, helping me decide if the game was immersive enough, and that it didn't contain some awkward interactions.
Now suppose we improve upon that. That instead of always having the same 1/3 chance of dying you would instead draw and reveal a bandit card, where it shows the odds for each roads. Moreover you could pay scouts some money to see the next card. Then you could also invest a bigger amount of money to hire caravan guards, so that when you do get attacked by bandits you have 4/6 chance to drive them off for example.
This leads to a much interesting story, where a merchant would die because he was too greedy to pay the scouts some coin, or live because he chose to spend some money to protect himself or earn riches cos he took a great risk and he got lucky.
So we fixed immersion quite a bit, but a game where you have a chance to die in the first turns is not really enjoyable. A game where you struggle and make all the tactics in the world to still have a relatively high chance of simply losing and going out of the game might have some sort experimental value, but won't be something people would want to play, at least not for a second time.
Now the easiest solution would of course be that you take out dying and replace it with losing some gold. If you lost all the gold then for the game's purposes it's same as dying. However I think something more resolute would be more interesting from a game design perspective.
However it is important to give players a solid chance of survival. Suppose the game lasted for 10 turns, each turn involving going from 1 city to another meaning risking your life 10 times. If the survival for each turn was 2/3, then the chance to survive the game is 1.7 %. In the case of 5/6 (only rolling 1 is deadly) the survival chance is 16 %. If you hired guards starting from the third turn and bandits attacked you with a 1/6 chance your chance of survival would be 27%, still way too low.
So when designing that aspect of the game we should start by setting the goal of what the odds of total survival should be. I'd suggest 97-99 % for a solid safe strategy, 75-95% for a occasional risk taker, and only most reckless daredevils chance of survival would drop below that to below 50% and so on to a almost certain death.
First of all we would have to lose the 6 sided dice and replace it with a 20 sided dice, as that would give us more accuracy when giving odds. Secondly, suppose the story went that players are the pioneers of making those trade routes, and bandits don't start to show up before players have totally earned a certain amount of gold. Then you could have multiple of bandit decks representing different densities of bandits, each one used once the players' total power level has achieved a certain amount. Then we'd like to set the amount so that in an average game the first deck would come into play on third turn, second on sixth turn and third one on ninth turn.
Secondly we could give certain characteristics to each of those decks. For example the easy deck would always have 2-3 roads with 0 risk, and max risk would be no bigger than 3/20. The medium deck would always have a single safe road and max risk would be 5/20. The high risk deck would have an average risk of 5/20, so you would have to hire guards to decrease your risk. So that if you wanted to play safer in the late game you could invest into guards. Also the more you invest into them the higher your chances for survival are.
This leads to safer merchants being able to go through the first 5 turns with 0 risk, and then with the implementation of guards and scouts could play through with risking as little as possible.
So now the rules have transformed the game into something which tells a meaningful story. Some merchants take knowingly risks for a chance to win the game, while others prefer to play a steady but safe game.
So to sum things up, when balancing a game, one needs to keep their eye not only player vs. player fairness, but also player vs. game and some parts of game vs. other parts of game balance to keep the game interesting and intense. Also the story balance is important, as this is the immersion part of the game. When tweaking numbers try to understand the meaning behind the numbers and feel the story it creates at the end. Good understanding of combinatorics is really important for that.
