Decide what balance is for before you tune

Before and during any balance pass, and any time someone says something is "unbalanced" — the first question is "relative to what goal?"

Balance is not one thing; it's a family of goals that often conflict, and the word hides which one you mean [S-schell-artofgamedesign]. Tuning a competitive game so every option is viable at expert level is a completely different job from tuning a power-fantasy RPG (where the player is supposed to become overwhelmingly strong) or a co-op game (where balance means everyone contributes) or a horror game (where "unfair" is the point). Chasing generic "fairness" without naming the target produces incoherent results — nerfing something that was doing exactly what the design wanted, or "balancing" the fun out of a deliberately lopsided moment. Naming the goal (this is DESIGN-0001 applied to numbers: balance for the experience produced) turns tuning from vague fiddling into aimed work.

State the balance goal for each system explicitly (e.g. "all five archetypes should be viable for a full playthrough" vs. "the mage should feel strongest late"). Judge tuning changes against that goal, not against a reflex toward parity. Recognize when a subsystem's goal differs from the game's and tune it on its own terms. Revisit the goal if the design shifts.

Balance-as-fairness (parity, competitive integrity) vs. balance-as-experience (tune toward the intended feeling, even if "unfair") is the philosophical split under the whole domain. Competitive games lean fairness; single-player and authored experiences lean experience. This principle says: pick your meaning deliberately.

The framing principle of the BAL domain — everything else (dominant strategies, symmetry, methods) is how; this is toward what. Directly an application of DESIGN-0001. Confidence 4.