Iron Edda Accelerated, and Balance

Powered by FATE Accelerated, Iron Edda Accelerated is a Norse-mythology inspired Mecha-RPG about warriors fighting alongside the bones of dead giants and metal monsters. Ragnarok has come to the land, and the evil dwarves are sending their mechanical constructs to destroy everything you hold dear. How will you survive the coming cataclysm?

You have a lot of choices: perhaps the most overt answer is “by binding my soul to the bones of an ancient giant and go Kaiju it up,” but that’s only one option. You could also be a Skald, a Seer, a Farmer, a Merchant, a Shieldbearer, or more; and all of these destinies result in a very different kind of game.

Naturally; being a pilot of an ancient frost-giant’s bones, you may be surprised to know, requires different skills than being a farmer. People will run to the giant corpse pilot when a monster is heading their way, not when the granary is running low.

But that’s hardly a balanced system, is it? When you’re fighting evil constructs seven times as tall as a human, what can a lowly swordsman do to help? Can they do anything?

Well, there aren’t just giant dwarven machines. There are smaller ones too, human sized or at least inside human scope. People need food, clothing, peace treaties, entertainment, and a thousand other things that a person piloting the bones of a dead giant can’t just punch into existence. Iron Edda Accelerated isn’t about fighting giant mechs — well, not just about that — it’s about your town, your world, your struggles, your survival.

What is balance? In the confines of RPGs, the concept can be a little tricky. After all, most RPGs have different “kinds” of characters, and each has their role to fill; soldiers do fighting, magi do magic, thieves and rogues do the dark and shadowy stuff. Is that “balanced?”

And that’s before we consider the fact that in the first editions of D&D levels were apportioned through XP, which you got through killing monsters. Different classes had different XP requirements, which meant that a party of characters might have wildly different levels and abilities. I’ve played a level 3 magic-user adventuring with a level 6 fighter before, and it certainly wasn’t “balanced.”

Most games nowadays use a “milestone” leveling mechanic, or at least a “shared XP” mechanic, so that everyone levels at roughly the same rate; but even that’s not the whole story. In a fight, if one character has a sword and the other has a five-story giant skeleton, we can easily say that’s unbalanced, right? But what if one has a sword and the other has a battle-axe? A crossbow? What if one is a trained soldier and the other is a clerk? What if it’s not a fight, but a harvest; won’t the farmer be a better person to have in your group than the runecaster? The fact is, individual situations aren’t balanced, so how can you balance a whole game?

Iron Edda Accelerated balances the giant-bone piloting warriors with the hardworking farmers and the magic-bending runecasters with “scales.” Scales are ways of measuring different acts and abilities so that they can be appropriately compared. The scales the system uses are Human, Heroic, Giant, Epic, and Godlike.

Human scale is the day to day life of humanity. Swords clash, Thanes speak, the plow cuts the earth; this is everyday life and scope. Heroic scale is when magic enters the picture, elevating the average person to a superior level of influence. Giant is the level of the Dwarven Destroyers and their bone-giant opponents, while Epic is reserved for the space between the mortal and immortal realms. Godlike is self-explanatory.

It’s easy to see how helpful this is. Two soldiers clashing swords might each struggle as much as a bone-giant struggles against a Dwarven Destroyer, but the soldier and Destroyer are clearly operating on different scopes. It gives players easily identifiable “lanes” for their actions, so a player who wants to influence the game must be aware at what scale their chosen action is operating in. A Giant-scale threat requires a Giant-scale solution, while a Human scale threat will mean little to an Epic level hero.

This is anything but balanced. At least, not at the outset. As written, a Bonebonded hero can affect things at Giant scale, so playing a Farmer is akin to playing one of the extras who goes to hide in the bomb shelter when Godzilla comes to call, right?

Well, no. Apart from the other little wrinkles the system introduces to complicate matters, a good GM won’t let that happen; not by prohibiting a player’s choices, but by providing properly scaled challenges.

Sure, a Bonebonded could flatten the invading army of humans, but can it do so when a Dwarven Destroyer is attacking the other side of town? Can the Seer spare the time to help put out the fire at the granary when the power of the protective stones is starting to fade? Tending the fields means people get to eat, and it doesn’t matter how skilled at war a Shieldbearer is: if they don’t eat, they can’t fight. Besides, who knows the local area better than the Farmer who’s family has tended the land for generations? Providing threats that are tailored to a character’s abilities is a major aspect of “balance,” and one that isn’t as mechanically clear cut as “every class gets two at-will powers and one per-encounter power.”

So, I suppose that means there are two kinds of balancing in games. The first is the fairly straightforward “mechanical” balance that arises from the simple axiom: any interesting choice offered to the player should not be obviously mechanically inferior to another. At its most simple: whether you pick up a sword, a crossbow, a battleaxe, or a spellbook, you will thwart the same number of monsters, though how you thwart them might look or feel different.

Broaden this out to tasks beyond combat, and you can say that in a well balanced game, “every skill will be useful in overcoming a relatively equal number of challenges.”

But how can a game system account for that? This is where the other kind of balance comes in; the kind that says Hawkeye is just as important as Thor, the kind that says a farmer and a wizard are both significant, the kind makes any system truly “balanced.” I’ll call it story balance, partially to keep the story/system spectrum going, and partially because it is entirely the purview of the story’s creators, rather than the system itself.

Next time, I want to talk about this kind of balance, and the thorny issues that crop up when you try and balance a story.