Balance is for curated experiences.
Balance exists to shape outcomes. It’s about tuning difficulty, smoothing edges, and ensuring players encounter challenges in a controlled, satisfying arc. That’s valuable in many kinds of games, where fairness and pacing are the point. The experience is designed first, and the player moves through it.
Tabletop RPGs ask something else entirely.
Are you playing the world or not?
An RPG isn’t a ride. It’s a place. The world doesn’t scale itself to your party, doesn’t guarantee fair fights, and doesn’t arrange events so every path feels equivalent. It exists on its own terms. When you engage with it, you’re exercising agency, not consuming balance.
That means you can make smart decisions, bad decisions, or desperate ones. You can walk into something unwinnable. You can retreat, negotiate, or fail. Those outcomes aren’t design flaws. They’re the texture that makes success meaningful. If every option is tuned to parity, the world becomes a menu, not a setting.
Balance ensures reliability. Playing the world creates consequence.
Neither approach is wrong. But they answer different questions. One asks how to deliver a curated experience. The other asks whether you’re willing to engage with a living environment that doesn’t revolve around you.
So when the conversation turns to balance in RPGs, the real question isn’t mechanical, it’s philosophical.
Are you playing the world, or expecting the world to play along?