While I agree with the author's notian that "some games need balance others don't"[1] I disagree with the premise. The author says that roleplaying games don't

While I agree with the author's notian that "some games need balance others don't"[1] I disagree with the premise. The author says that roleplaying games don't need balance because they are about telling stories, and that "other games" need balance because they are about the challenge, gameplay and competition. I kind of agree with this. Then he goes on to caracterize games by their capabiblity of being played withour roleplaying. By this logic, he then says that not only World of Warcraft is not a roleplaying game, but Dungeons and Dragons isn't one either. This is followed by "You can play board games such as Rex and Battlestar Galactica and even Settlers of Catan without roleplaying… but roleplaying seems to make them more enjoyable. [...] but if you go too far in that direction, you’ll lose. And the goal of those games is to win. Roleplaying, in the end, sabotages the goal of the game." "...try playing games such as Vampire or Pendragon or Our Last Best Hope or World of Dew or Deadlands without roleplaying, you’re missing the entire point of the game." This, in internet lingo, is what is called "BadWrongFun", i.e. you can't have fun playing a game in a way different than the intended by the authors. I don't think there is such a thing as "BadWrongFun". I have this ruleset, I should be allowed to do with it whatever I want. I can roleplay in chess. I can call my knight Tim and have him be the queen's brother. And when he is captured, the grieving queen only moves half the distance. And I can also have a highly tactical dungeon crawl in (let's pick a narrative focused roleplaying game) FATE, completely ignoring setting, theme and story, throwing challenge after challenge at the players. Both of these are OK, and many more. IMO, the problem with the authors logic is the idea of the objective or point of the game. That when you play Chess you want to win, when you play WoW you want to level up, and when you play a roleplaying game you want to craft and experience a story. I'll refute this with an example: The "point" of the car is to help people move around and carry goods. But there are people who like to race cars. There are people who like to tune them and modify them. And some like to collect them. Because what people do with something doesn't always match its purpose. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with roleplaying chess, or being a min-maxer[2] in a roleplaying game. People can do whatever they want with their games. Losing in chess is not bad if the player didn't care for winning or losing in the first place. To finish my rant, here's my last thought: All games need balance, some more than others. But the balance required for a game depends on the context of the gaming session and the players goals for that gaming session. [1] And I'd reiterate it as "some games need more balance than others" [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min-maxing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min-maxing