>>43948992
GURPS. GURPS. GURPS. GURPS.

Truly balanced?

You make every possible option identical. If everything is the same, then it's balanced.

Decently balanced? Depends on the game, it's intentions, and it's system.

Balance is an ideal you can never quite reach. It's always a design objective worth striving for, even if it can never entirely be achieved.

Some systems are perfectly balanced, at least mechanically. They tend to be very simple, rules light narrative affairs like Don't Rest Your Head or the various *World games. But the reason they're balanced is that the options available to you aren't particularly mechanically varied or distinct. As soon as you begin to add complex, varied subsystems, balance becomes harder and harder to achieve.

In terms of systems which are sufficiently complex for imbalance to be a major concern, D&D 4e honestly does a pretty good job. While there are optimal builds and ways to sorta screw yourself over, it's also quite difficult to make a character who doesn't contribute to the group, or a character who utterly dominates it.

>>43948992
Importance and forms of balancement depend heavily on the type of game we're talking about.

In a competitive game, 'balancement' means every player should get more or less the same chances to win. So, for example, in a wargame you shoudn't have a faction which performs objectively worse than another on every field.
Yet wargames are a difficult subject by themselves. It's hard to determine wheter a better form of balancement is 'you can get a number of competitive, top tier lists from every faction, but you have to use specific unit in specific numbers with specific options' or 'you can play pretty much what you prefer from your faction and, as long as there's some internal logic, you have your fair chances to win'.

In a cooperative game or a RPG, balancement is more likely 'every player should get their share of fun and protagonism in the story, rather than having the X character/class doing all the job and the Y character/class being unable to keep up'

>>43949192
What about rock-paper-scissors? The advantage of 4e was that it had quite distinct roles that were well-preserved.

>>43948992
1: all players act simultaneously/in real time Turns are inherently imbalanced since going first means you can affect the game state before anyone can stop you)

2: all players have access to the same things.
If all players can pick the same units/classes/weapons the game is at least balanced in theory, since anyone can do the most broken thing if they so choose, even if the game can end up imbalanced as a result of players choosing differently.

It's a tricky question to answer without you giving us your definition of balanced, do you want balance in opportunity or balance in outcome?

It's all down to point of view whether you think 40k for instance, is balanced because anyone can make army X, where X is the currently most op one, or if you think it's imbalanced because people who chose not to build army X are at a disadvantage against those who do.

>>43949247
This, pretty much. Balancing implies less-interesting options. There's not really any amount of "+X to hit" that balances against "can fly", so if you're wanting to break everything down to a perfectly balanced wargame, no one is allowed to fly out of melee range.

This is, depending on what you want out of a game, either what 4E did right, or what it did wrong.

Is bridge, for example, balanced, in your opinion? There are good hands and bad hands, but everybody has the same chance at the beginning unless there's a difference in skill.

>>43949457
Better question, is poker balanced? Your hand is determined at random but it doesn't really matter what cards you get, the game isn't about the cards its about what you do with the hand you got.

>>43948992
>How do you make a game that is truly balanced?

Both sides identical. Best 2 out of 3. Whoever goes first in the first match goes second in the next one. Third match starting player determined by coin flip.

The wizard and cat aliens are cute