Why does the party need to be balanced?

[NichG]

The Oriental Adventures version of Iaijutsu Master is the real cheese here, with the rules text 'you add your Cha mod to each damage die in an Iaijutsu Focus strike'. Which caps out at what, something like 12 times Cha mod to damage? But I think that has been reprinted, so probably not usable in practice at most tables.

I'd guess that some other OA stuff is pretty good for monkish things that don't suck. Freezing the Lifeblood makes Stunning Fist into a serious save-or-lose consideration since its 1d4+1 rounds of paralysis rather than a half-round hiccup, for example.

Shiba Protector isn't explicitly for unarmed combatants, but it synergizes really well with Monk or unarmed Swordsage, granting Wisdom modifier to both attack and damage rolls early on, gets SR and some improvements to saves as you go, and as the capstone basically lets you use Wisdom for all rolls in place of other attributes (there's some weird interaction with mages thing due to the fluff though, which may be a wash). From an optimization standpoint, I think I'd keep it to a 1 level dip.

Tattooed Monk looks like it has a lot of optimization potential to me (Bellflower tattoo letting you effectively add half your Cha mod to anything involving a stat, some diversity in the multiple tattoos including some absolute abilities like 'cannot be moved', immunities to fear, poison, etc, and something that actually gives you temporary skill 'ranks' rather than a bonus to skill and lets you break the normal skill rank level caps) but I don't have a ready build for it in my head.

[ezekielraiden]

So, it's been a while, and I don't really think it's fitting to the conversation for me to reply to stuff people said to me quite some time ago. Suffice it to say that I do not agree that I have "missed" things, and that the characterization of what I was talking about as mandatory requirements for fun (in the way that dancing shoes or climbing equipment are mandatory requirements for dancing) is severely missing my point.

And since analogies, as always, have failed us, I figure it's fair to ask a couple questions.

1. When you play a cooperative game and intend to have fun doing so, do you expect to have fun by participating meaningfully less than other players, e.g. even if you factor in both quantity and quality of contribution, the game's rules force you to contribute less?

2. When you play a cooperative game where the different options are billed as reasonably equivalent, does it concern you if that billing proves false?

3. When you play a cooperative game where your personal tastes and interests are a major factor in the play experience for everyone, would it concern you that your tastes and interests were being specifically reduced in impact, while others' tastes and interests were specifically increased, without you being informed about this in advance? (Note that this difference in treatment is not applied to your tastes because you have them; rather, it is a specific set of tastes, which you coincidentally hold, and others don't.)

4. When you play a cooperative game, do you have fun when other players can regularly invalidate the specific thing you wanted to bring to the group, while you have effectively zero ability to invalidate what others might choose to bring?

And then one final question:
Don't all of these apply to D&D?

We get told we're a party of adventurers, not characters-in-a-novel*, who are on a quest together, teammates, perhaps even friends. From that Watsonian standpoint, it is reasonable that the party should expect every member to contribute up to a similar level of impact. Not identical, since perfection and identicalness are probably impossible to define under these conditions, but at least similar--a teammate merely coasting on "aren't we friends" and shared sentiment is an undesirable situation, particularly when we as non-Watsonian players can choose to not have it be that way. And then from the Doylist perspective, the rules-text of the D&D books not only actively avoids mentioning anything about power imbalances (I have not read a single WotC D&D book that ever says anything remotely like "Wizards will grow to become the most powerful characters" or "Fighters will tend to be more limited in their contributions as they gain levels, due to lacking the versatility of spellcasting.") Indeed, both the books themselves and WotC-provided advice explicitly pushes at least one or two players toward these limited classes, while explicitly telling them that that is a vital part of any competent adventuring team.

The books, if not outright lying, certainly provide deceptive information and actively avoid indicating that certain preferences carry meaningfully more power, versatility, and impact and others just carry less, perhaps even none at all on a regular basis for the kinds of threats one may face. (See: non-spellcasting melee classes vs. flying enemies.)

I am not, and never have been, saying that balance is absolutely mandatory for 100% of people to have fun. That would be a pointlessly foolish thing to argue. What I am instead saying is that game designers designing a specifically cooperative game have certain concepts and commitments implied by that goal. "Balance" does not guarantee fun. But when you cannot solidly predict all the details of how a group of people will play your game, efforts in that direction have a demonstrable tendency to ensure that, while the details will differ, the overall picture will be similarly enjoyable for the majority of players, and that's the best you can do with game design (well, and still allow for player choice that actually matters).

*Because I have to actually specify characters written by an author, I guess, even though that was extremely clear from context earlier. Characters-in-a-novel have no feelings, they aren't people with physical hearts and brains and life. Characters-in-a-novel experience feelings-in-a-novel, but literally only those written by the author. The author may be bad at writing, and write those feelings badly, or a good one and write them well, but either way the characters-in-a-novel are not alive, don't feel, don't think, don't act, don't do anything. We can project humanity and sapience and moral weight onto them, and we can care about those fictional projections quite a lot, but in the end they are infinitely less than the smallest ant in terms of the capacity to feel. A character cannot feel slighted by her author for giving her a bit part. A character can be written to react to a written author avatar with such responses, but in the end they are still just words on a page. Your fellow players are not just words on a page. They are real people. Even if you don't believe they deserve respect (though I am sure you believe they do), they are clearly not the same as characters-in-a-novel, and their living-person-at-a-table feelings and agency matter, a lot, for game design. We cannot look to the "feelings" of Frodo and Samwise and Gandalf--purely fictional beings, whose every thought and deed were meticulously placed into them--to justify how our actions, including "designing a game" actions, affect the feelings of living-persons-at-tables.

[NichG]

So, it's been a while, and I don't really think it's fitting to the conversation for me to reply to stuff people said to me quite some time ago. Suffice it to say that I do not agree that I have "missed" things, and that the characterization of what I was talking about as mandatory requirements for fun (in the way that dancing shoes or climbing equipment are mandatory requirements for dancing) is severely missing my point.

And since analogies, as always, have failed us, I figure it's fair to ask a couple questions.

1. When you play a cooperative game and intend to have fun doing so, do you expect to have fun by participating meaningfully less than other players, e.g. even if you factor in both quantity and quality of contribution, the game's rules force you to contribute less?

2. When you play a cooperative game where the different options are billed as reasonably equivalent, does it concern you if that billing proves false?

3. When you play a cooperative game where your personal tastes and interests are a major factor in the play experience for everyone, would it concern you that your tastes and interests were being specifically reduced in impact, while others' tastes and interests were specifically increased, without you being informed about this in advance? (Note that this difference in treatment is not applied to your tastes because you have them; rather, it is a specific set of tastes, which you coincidentally hold, and others don't.)

4. When you play a cooperative game, do you have fun when other players can regularly invalidate the specific thing you wanted to bring to the group, while you have effectively zero ability to invalidate what others might choose to bring?

And then one final question:
Don't all of these apply to D&D?

For me: 1 is a non-sequiteur, 2 is 'yes', 3 is 'partial yes', 4 is not applicable, 5 is 'no, 2 and 3 apply, 1 and 4 do not apply'

The 'yes' of 2 and 3 has to do with the system being misleading. Things such as 'billing it as X, but it's Y' do concern me and are the primary discontent. The reason 2 is a full yes whereas 3 is a partial is that 2 specifies that the game bills things as equivalent, whereas 3 only specifies that the game does not inform me in advance, and in many cases I can reasonably intuit whether or not a game is going to be relevant to my interests without having to be explicitly told. 3 applies for D&D because determining that from the rules is non-trivial enough that I would accept that it is misleading to a problematic level.

Now, 1: I expect when playing a game to have choices as to the degree of my participation, and that the system gives me tools to make those choices. One choice might be that I want to keep things low key for that campaign, or that I want to challenge myself, or that I want to try to take a leadership role, or that I want the ability to know what's going on. I also recognize not all systems will give me all of these choices, nor will they necessarily give me those choices in the same way or in any kind of directly marked fashion. So 'do I expect to participate equally?' - no. But 'do I expect that I could choose to participate equally?' - yes. But 'do I expect that I will participate equally regardless of what choices I make?' - no. The real non-sequiteur here is 'when the game's rules force you to contribute less' - if I take that literally, it can only do that if it explicitly names me or if there's some kind of 'contribution lottery' where I have no choice as to what I play. There's also so much metagame social dynamics surrounding this that I cannot see myself being forced to be ineffective if I want to be and I'm gaming with anybody that I know. It's an extreme example, but I've been in an epic campaign where someone refused to level past Lv1 and the GM worked with them to find a way to still make it work. I can accept that people may not know how to negotiate such variances, but for me that level of thing fits more into points 2 and 3 which have to do with what is fundamentally a failure of communication - which I do think is a serious problem - rather than a failure of balance.

And 4: Not applicable because the thing I ultimately want from gaming is not to make other people respect how useful I am, but to have experiences and explore ideas or ways of thinking and reacting to the world. Other players can interfere with that, but they would have to be actively antagonistic to do so, and I won't play with a group that is actively antagonistic to me regardless of the choice of game or rules. I similarly have no desire to invalidate what other players are bringing to the table. Now, the DM can certainly interfere with my ability to get what I want out of gaming, but IME that is much more a function of the DM than the system, to the extent that I don't think there is a system that would let me get what I want out of the game if the DM were bad or even average.

[Cluedrew]

So I think I may have gone a little bit astray. I was thinking about what I had meant to say and I realized I had already said most of it.

The first bit is quite simple but only applies to systems that are supposed to balanced. Systems should not have false advertising, they should do what they say on the tin, how ever you want to put it. I think that is just bad design.

The second part is that balance isn't actually the point, the ability to make a meaningful contribution. To have a noticeable impact on the course of the game/campaign. "Balance" provides that and for me it is the measure of balance and power. I have seen campaigns were the "on paper" weakest person in the party had some of the largest impacts on events and therefore came across as one of the strongest. And there were "weaker" characters who did less, but the best campaigns I have played, there has never been a character you could erase and things would remain the same. And even if there was, I don't think playing that character would be very fun.

[Mechalich]

The 'yes' of 2 and 3 has to do with the system being misleading. Things such as 'billing it as X, but it's Y' do concern me and are the primary discontent. The reason 2 is a full yes whereas 3 is a partial is that 2 specifies that the game bills things as equivalent, whereas 3 only specifies that the game does not inform me in advance, and in many cases I can reasonably intuit whether or not a game is going to be relevant to my interests without having to be explicitly told. 3 applies for D&D because determining that from the rules is non-trivial enough that I would accept that it is misleading to a problematic level.

The first bit is quite simple but only applies to systems that are supposed to balanced. Systems should not have false advertising, they should do what they say on the tin, how ever you want to put it. I think that is just bad design.

There is, in overall design a certain tension between offering as many options as possible, and offering balanced options. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of D&D due to its commitment to being the most massive kitchen sink possible.

For example, D&D's kitchen-sink nature leads it to try and promise a way to build a 3' tall halfling who fights with twin daggers wearing leather who is an equal combatant to a 6' 8" human in full plate wielding a halberd. Pretending this sort of mismatch can come out even leads to weirdness and you start twisting around balance against the fiction from the very beginning.

The less options you're dealing with the more it's possible to keep those options balanced, while the more options you permit the more impossible it becomes to manage balance. That's why video games like MMOs tend to heavily restrict options and render things as similar as possible even when this means blatant denial of verisimilitude (in FFXIV the Lalafels, the resident halfling race, run just as fast as the characters who are twice their height in order to sustain game balance). As a result a game that permits all possible concepts will never manage balance because the various concepts are themselves not equal and no amount of mechanical chicanery is going to twist them back into a semblance of balance.

The easiest path towards game balance is having all characters being some variation on the same overall theme, so that everyone gets some identical base package and then you only have to balance the add-ons. A game where everyone plays Navy SEALs is a nice example, where you have the sniper, the medic, and the engineer, but everyone already knows how to fire a rifle, take cover, and move with stealth. This is also while many D&D balance issues are mitigated so long as you play 'in a box' (both metaphorically and literally), as D&D video game history shows.

Options vs. balance represents a very real economic tension in game design. More options, after all, means you can pump out more sourcebooks and make more money. There are, after all, people who want to play swashbucklers, knife fighters, and the like, and so there's an incentive to offer those as options even when the system mechanics means they'll never be viable. Likewise there are certain abilities and powers that spellcasters have gotten used to having over time and if you nerf them away people get annoyed. This goes well beyond D&D, superhero games regularly include powers that sound cool but that only a deranged GM would actually allow a character to have (time manipulation, I'm looking at you).

Personally I've come to develop the opinion that if you want universality you're going to have to sacrifice balance and accept that your game is enjoying the gonzo - something that both Planescape in D&D and whole games like Rifts do just fine. Otherwise the system (or the permutations of the system if using a toolkit system like FATE) needs to be tied to a setting and tightly constrained.

[Quertus]

Spoiler: "what has come before

Show

So, it's been a while, and I don't really think it's fitting to the conversation for me to reply to stuff people said to me quite some time ago. Suffice it to say that I do not agree that I have "missed" things, and that the characterization of what I was talking about as mandatory requirements for fun (in the way that dancing shoes or climbing equipment are mandatory requirements for dancing) is severely missing my point.

And since analogies, as always, have failed us, I figure it's fair to ask a couple questions.

1. When you play a cooperative game and intend to have fun doing so, do you expect to have fun by participating meaningfully less than other players, e.g. even if you factor in both quantity and quality of contribution, the game's rules force you to contribute less?

2. When you play a cooperative game where the different options are billed as reasonably equivalent, does it concern you if that billing proves false?

3. When you play a cooperative game where your personal tastes and interests are a major factor in the play experience for everyone, would it concern you that your tastes and interests were being specifically reduced in impact, while others' tastes and interests were specifically increased, without you being informed about this in advance? (Note that this difference in treatment is not applied to your tastes because you have them; rather, it is a specific set of tastes, which you coincidentally hold, and others don't.)

4. When you play a cooperative game, do you have fun when other players can regularly invalidate the specific thing you wanted to bring to the group, while you have effectively zero ability to invalidate what others might choose to bring?

And then one final question:
Don't all of these apply to D&D?

We get told we're a party of adventurers, not characters-in-a-novel*, who are on a quest together, teammates, perhaps even friends. From that Watsonian standpoint, it is reasonable that the party should expect every member to contribute up to a similar level of impact. Not identical, since perfection and identicalness are probably impossible to define under these conditions, but at least similar--a teammate merely coasting on "aren't we friends" and shared sentiment is an undesirable situation, particularly when we as non-Watsonian players can choose to not have it be that way. And then from the Doylist perspective, the rules-text of the D&D books not only actively avoids mentioning anything about power imbalances (I have not read a single WotC D&D book that ever says anything remotely like "Wizards will grow to become the most powerful characters" or "Fighters will tend to be more limited in their contributions as they gain levels, due to lacking the versatility of spellcasting.") Indeed, both the books themselves and WotC-provided advice explicitly pushes at least one or two players toward these limited classes, while explicitly telling them that that is a vital part of any competent adventuring team.

The books, if not outright lying, certainly provide deceptive information and actively avoid indicating that certain preferences carry meaningfully more power, versatility, and impact and others just carry less, perhaps even none at all on a regular basis for the kinds of threats one may face. (See: non-spellcasting melee classes vs. flying enemies.)

I am not, and never have been, saying that balance is absolutely mandatory for 100% of people to have fun. That would be a pointlessly foolish thing to argue. What I am instead saying is that game designers designing a specifically cooperative game have certain concepts and commitments implied by that goal. "Balance" does not guarantee fun. But when you cannot solidly predict all the details of how a group of people will play your game, efforts in that direction have a demonstrable tendency to ensure that, while the details will differ, the overall picture will be similarly enjoyable for the majority of players, and that's the best you can do with game design (well, and still allow for player choice that actually matters).

*Because I have to actually specify characters written by an author, I guess, even though that was extremely clear from context earlier. Characters-in-a-novel have no feelings, they aren't people with physical hearts and brains and life. Characters-in-a-novel experience feelings-in-a-novel, but literally only those written by the author. The author may be bad at writing, and write those feelings badly, or a good one and write them well, but either way the characters-in-a-novel are not alive, don't feel, don't think, don't act, don't do anything. We can project humanity and sapience and moral weight onto them, and we can care about those fictional projections quite a lot, but in the end they are infinitely less than the smallest ant in terms of the capacity to feel. A character cannot feel slighted by her author for giving her a bit part. A character can be written to react to a written author avatar with such responses, but in the end they are still just words on a page. Your fellow players are not just words on a page. They are real people. Even if you don't believe they deserve respect (though I am sure you believe they do), they are clearly not the same as characters-in-a-novel, and their living-person-at-a-table feelings and agency matter, a lot, for game design. We cannot look to the "feelings" of Frodo and Samwise and Gandalf--purely fictional beings, whose every thought and deed were meticulously placed into them--to justify how our actions, including "designing a game" actions, affect the feelings of living-persons-at-tables.

For me: 1 is a non-sequiteur, 2 is 'yes', 3 is 'partial yes', 4 is not applicable, 5 is 'no, 2 and 3 apply, 1 and 4 do not apply'

The 'yes' of 2 and 3 has to do with the system being misleading. Things such as 'billing it as X, but it's Y' do concern me and are the primary discontent. The reason 2 is a full yes whereas 3 is a partial is that 2 specifies that the game bills things as equivalent, whereas 3 only specifies that the game does not inform me in advance, and in many cases I can reasonably intuit whether or not a game is going to be relevant to my interests without having to be explicitly told. 3 applies for D&D because determining that from the rules is non-trivial enough that I would accept that it is misleading to a problematic level.

Now, 1: I expect when playing a game to have choices as to the degree of my participation, and that the system gives me tools to make those choices. One choice might be that I want to keep things low key for that campaign, or that I want to challenge myself, or that I want to try to take a leadership role, or that I want the ability to know what's going on. I also recognize not all systems will give me all of these choices, nor will they necessarily give me those choices in the same way or in any kind of directly marked fashion. So 'do I expect to participate equally?' - no. But 'do I expect that I could choose to participate equally?' - yes. But 'do I expect that I will participate equally regardless of what choices I make?' - no. The real non-sequiteur here is 'when the game's rules force you to contribute less' - if I take that literally, it can only do that if it explicitly names me or if there's some kind of 'contribution lottery' where I have no choice as to what I play. There's also so much metagame social dynamics surrounding this that I cannot see myself being forced to be ineffective if I want to be and I'm gaming with anybody that I know. It's an extreme example, but I've been in an epic campaign where someone refused to level past Lv1 and the GM worked with them to find a way to still make it work. I can accept that people may not know how to negotiate such variances, but for me that level of thing fits more into points 2 and 3 which have to do with what is fundamentally a failure of communication - which I do think is a serious problem - rather than a failure of balance.

And 4: Not applicable because the thing I ultimately want from gaming is not to make other people respect how useful I am, but to have experiences and explore ideas or ways of thinking and reacting to the world. Other players can interfere with that, but they would have to be actively antagonistic to do so, and I won't play with a group that is actively antagonistic to me regardless of the choice of game or rules. I similarly have no desire to invalidate what other players are bringing to the table. Now, the DM can certainly interfere with my ability to get what I want out of gaming, but IME that is much more a function of the DM than the system, to the extent that I don't think there is a system that would let me get what I want out of the game if the DM were bad or even average.

So I think I may have gone a little bit astray. I was thinking about what I had meant to say and I realized I had already said most of it.

The first bit is quite simple but only applies to systems that are supposed to balanced. Systems should not have false advertising, they should do what they say on the tin, how ever you want to put it. I think that is just bad design.

The second part is that balance isn't actually the point, the ability to make a meaningful contribution. To have a noticeable impact on the course of the game/campaign. "Balance" provides that and for me it is the measure of balance and power. I have seen campaigns were the "on paper" weakest person in the party had some of the largest impacts on events and therefore came across as one of the strongest. And there were "weaker" characters who did less, but the best campaigns I have played, there has never been a character you could erase and things would remain the same. And even if there was, I don't think playing that character would be very fun.

I think NichG has given what will likely be the best answer to this series of questions. But I'll give my less good answer, and my own unique take anyway.

Before reading that response, my answers were:

1) yes. 2) yes. 3) huh? 4) yes. 5) mu.

Best bit: you had me at "zero ability to invalidate what others might choose to bring".

Really, I think replying to Cluedrew will be most productive in explaining my stance. I agree on the issue of false advertising. I think 3e's biggest problem is one of PR, of delivery - the fact that it doesn't advertise its imbalance.

As to "balance" and "impact on events"… you're right, but it's complicated.

What matters is that the players are having fun.

What matters is what matters to a player's fun.

Each person is different; what matters to each person's fun is different. In fact, what matters to my fun will vary by system, character, group, and game.

You can generally count on me to care about role-playing, exploration, forming connections, and contribution. And… whatever hates Captain Hobo, and railroading. But I care about role-playing over forming connections - if the character isn't interested, I won't pursue it. And, although it is my greatest source of fun, exploration is completely optional.

Also, I'm perfectly happy with contributing in different vectors. While the other 4 party members are balanced for "tactical basketball simulator", I'm playing "highschool romance drama".

While those with the right skills can contribute to the party (heh) by baking great food, or setting up beautiful decorations, I lean on my strengths, and ask everyone what they'd like to drink.

But, yes, at its simplest, what most people IME care about is "contribution", even though most people IME cannot actually conceptualize their complaints when things fail beyond "balance".

-----

So, what else do I have to add to this round of this conversation?

Balance to the table. If you do that, do any of these "problems" still exist?

What else? Ah, yes, "imbalance is mandatory for certain types of fun". Thus, *enforced balance* / systems without unbalanced elements, are less fun overall. But even they require informed consent - the players should know what they are getting into (even if that is "the unknown").

-----

Oh! As long as we're asking questions, I've got one! What if an RPG came with chess clocks, and what was balanced wasn't "how much you contribute", but "how much you cost the group by contributing"? So, in combat, the longer you take to take your turn, the fewer turns you get, such that everyone gets approximately equal time in combat. Same with other scenes, too. That would be 100% fair - everyone gets an equal share of the spotlight. Would you implement this revolutionary new RPG mechanic in your games? Why / why not?

(To clarify, combat (and other scenes) are designed to require many moves to resolve. Everyone gets one move, then the person with the least spotlight time gets to take another move, repeat. So, if one player were extremely efficient, while the others were spotlight hogs, the turn order (excluding opposition, if applicable) could be ABCDAAAABDAACABAAAA, for example.)

[Mutazoia]

If you want to talk mechanical balance, you can look at it this way:

If your game has 10 classes, and 2 of the classes can do their job, but also be just as good, if not better than, the jobs of the other 8 classes, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

If your game has 10 classes, and 1 or 2 of those classes can regularly, by X level, put out more damage than the other 8 or 9 classes combined, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

[Calthropstu]

If you want to talk mechanical balance, you can look at it this way:

If your game has 10 classes, and 2 of the classes can do their job, but also be just as good, if not better than, the jobs of the other 8 classes, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

If your game has 10 classes, and 1 or 2 of those classes can regularly, by X level, put out more damage than the other 8 or 9 classes combined, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

Funny. We have a sorc in my game. Who feels our paladin outshines him completely. Everything the sorc tries ends in dismal failure. Failed sr rolls, missed disintigrates, underwhelming disintigrate damage when it does hit, everything has resistance to all elements...

Meanwhile the paladin steamrolls through the daemons. I had to throw a cr 5 hivher than their level, surround him with minions, and modify his resources before i even stood a shot of not being insta-smite-killed.

[ezekielraiden]

For me: 1 is a non-sequiteur, 2 is 'yes', 3 is 'partial yes', 4 is not applicable, 5 is 'no, 2 and 3 apply, 1 and 4 do not apply'

In the interest of saving space, I'm only quoting this part. Also, to avoid needless repetition: "spellcasting+" and related forms refer to spellcasters (Wizard, Cleric, etc.) and anything primarily like spellcasting (psionics, Incarnum, magic items that generate spell or spell-like effects and usually needing a spellcaster to craft them, etc.), while "non-spellcasting" refers to...everything else (mundane Fighters, non-UMD Rogues, etc.)

I'm glad you and I agree on both 2 and 3, and I accept your caveat for 3 in that sufficiently-simple systems can make it not apply...but D&D, and basically every game of comparable style and development (PF, 13A, retroclones, etc.), is not sufficiently simple. Now, for the two questions where we may not (probably not) agree.

1: I assert D&D-alikes force a power hierarchy of archetypes, unless players work (knowingly or not) to play rather sub-optimally. Smart players that put reasonable work into exploiting their resources will find some archetypes have a much lower participation "ceiling," almost regardless of at-table effects. Even with some access to spellcasting+, you have far greater space to play in, unequivocally. You get more game to play with, both in rules and in solutions. I.e., "rules" because like a fifth to a third of all mechanics are bloody spells/etc. And "solutions" because there are few to no effects available to non-spellcasting archetypes that aren't also available to spellcasting+ ones, but many effects that only spellcasting+ (in whole or in part) can access that non-spellcasting emphatically cannot. You have zip-zero-nada control over that as a player. If you prefer Herakles-type characters and you play PF, you either have to accept that you'll never be even comparably good to the tales of Herakles, or you have to choose to play a gorram spellcaster, as (more or less) said in that now-infamous blogpost by Mr. Bulmahn.

TL;DR: You aren't allowed to choose to participate equally, if you have preferences that don't match the game. And the game goes out of its way to avoid telling you this (and may even conceal it). Spellcasting+ archetypes always have greater freedom of choice than non-spellcasting archetypes; they can choose to "play down," but non-spellcasting archetypes cannot choose to "play up."

As for 4: We just disagree then. I think it's quite easy for a system to interfere with the ability to play what you (generic you) wish to play, to feel the experiences you wish to feel. It does so by radically restricting the rule- and solution-space available to you, such that you may literally be unable to do what you want to do and still follow the rules. Herakles is one example, to be sure, but even Conan requires some pretty heavy optimization *and* DM buy-in just to exist, let alone survive even half of the adventures he went on, and that was back in the days when spellcasting+ had far more limitations than it does today.

The first bit is quite simple but only applies to systems that are supposed to balanced. Systems should not have false advertising, they should do what they say on the tin, how ever you want to put it. I think that is just bad design.

Given that the designers of Pathfinder (1e and 2e), as well as (3rd, 4th, and) 5th Edition D&D, 13th Age, Shadowrun, and literally every other "prominent" game in the TTRPG market at least talk about balance, and write their eventual book-text such that balance is a concern, it would seem to me that this requirement is trivially met. All prominent RPGs make at least some claim, both in explicit author intent and in implicit in-book statements, to desiring balance. Several fail to meet this bar. (Shadowrun under its current owners has experienced some similar issues, with some fans deriding it as "Magicrun" because intelligently-employed magic outpaces other solutions by too significant a degree.)

The second part is that balance isn't actually the point, the ability to make a meaningful contribution.

I grant without question that you can artificially make any character the "most important" in a game. That's never been in doubt. It is the (degree of) necessity of it that I have major problems with. Spellcaster+ archetypes will naturally drift into being "more important" characters. Non-spellcasters will naturally drift away from it. The game's rules therefore discourage some archetypes over others, purely on the basis of their aesthetic traits. Those natural drifts can be fought against--but you emphatically should not have to fight them. Who becomes important should be something purely decided by the players (counting the DM as a player), or by the roll of the dice, not by the game's designers.

There is, in overall design a certain tension between offering as many options as possible, and offering balanced options. <snip> The less options you're dealing with the more it's possible to keep those options balanced, while the more options you permit the more impossible it becomes to manage balance.

While true, that doesn't mean there are zero ways to address this tension. For example, extensible framework rules: rules that don't try to provide individual solutions for every specific case, but which have a flexible framework that can adapt to fit the vast majority of applications. To reference, for example, 13A's core book: there is a Heroic (starting tier) and Champion (mid-tier) Linguist feat, but no Epic (final tier) version, because if you want an Epic Linguist feat, you already know better what you want than they do. Explicit recognition that the Feat system, and in particular its application to languages and the like, is an extensible framework that can and should get extensions to apply to any given campaign.

Again, I'm not saying this makes the tension go away, nor that it can resolve all forms of it. But there is room between knowing that the tension is there, and surrendering to an allegedly "impossible" problem. It's a lot more tractable than you give it credit for, but it may require creative solutions.

There are, after all, people who want to play swashbucklers, knife fighters, and the like, and so there's an incentive to offer those as options even when the system mechanics means they'll never be viable. Likewise there are certain abilities and powers that spellcasters have gotten used to having over time and if you nerf them away people get annoyed.

In all honesty? People who have gotten used to being just better than other people, purely due to their preferences being different from those other people? I have zero care for them. It's not petulant to ask for equal treatment from the game's designers, particularly when (as noted above) basically every game designer ever, of any game with even moderate popularity, at VERY least pays lip service to "balance" even if their work falls short. If your (generic your) fun is dependent on being just better-off than other players, maybe D&D-alike games that tell the players they're supposed to be very roughly equal contributors aren't for those players. Maybe that's a toxic cultural element that needs to be addressed. Maybe it's time we had a frank and open conversation between designers and players, to see if players actually do want such permanent, entrenched inequality, or if it's primarily lingering due to (sub)cultural inertia.

Personally I've come to develop the opinion that if you want universality you're going to have to sacrifice balance and accept that your game is enjoying the gonzo

And what of extensible framework rules? Though 4e's skill challenges were very rough around the edges (as is often the case for entirely brand-new mechanical systems), I have seen them work utterly brilliantly for capturing an incredibly wide variety of situations. Extensible framework rules, with the explicit notion that they can cover lots and the places where they don't work would need DM involvement anyway, can be extremely well-balanced while also being sufficiently general as to cover the vast majority of use cases. (13th Age's "montage" and "fighting in spirit" rules, among other clever innovations, are other examples.)

1) yes. 2) yes. 3) huh? 4) yes. 5) mu.

Cool. As above, clipping a long but quality reply to save space. (This is already a long post!) In response to your "huh?": In D&D, it's expected that the group collectively contributes to the progress of the game. If a player chooses to play a Paladin, the DM not only can but should take that into account. Whether that's because they're the only Paladin and thus the world takes on a darker look so it can be made brighter through her efforts, or there are many Paladins and their good deeds have helped make the world a better place, or whatever else, the DM takes the players' preferences (in both "what I choose to play" and "how I choose to play it") and builds that into the experience for the group collectively--and the DM is just as much a "player" here as the people with character sheets. Thing is? D&D both overtly and covertly supports some preferences better than others. It actively works against DMs who try to make non-spellcaster archetypes (which are collections of preferences) more relevant...because the rules spend far, far more time, words, and effort on the relevance of spellcaster+ archetypes. And no choice you make, at any point, can change that inherent bias. A DM who works their ass off can enable characters like OotS's Roy...but it requires working your ass off. In any other game, Vaarsuvius would automatically be the most important person, because V is world-warpingly powerful even without the mega-power side-plots they've had.

Best bit: you had me at "zero ability to invalidate what others might choose to bring". What matters is that the players are having fun. What matters is what matters to a player's fun. [Snipped: fun is unique to each player.] But, yes, at its simplest, what most people IME care about is "contribution", even though most people IME cannot actually conceptualize their complaints when things fail beyond "balance".

Because balance, when rigorous, provides a starting position of equanimity. In the ideal case (read: an impossible goal, but one worth pursuing to get reasonably close), the system induces no preconditioning at all, meaning it is only the active choices made by the players and DM that matters for determining who or what is "important." Ideals and perfection are impossible, but pursuing them gets us close, and in this case people often treat the impossibility of the target as a reason to not even try--when trying really, truly can get partial results.

And, as I said above? I really don't care much about the opinions of people whose fun requires other people forced into an inferior position. That's an incredibly selfish, petty kind of fun that cooperative gaming in general, and D&D specifically, could do without. (Frankly, I doubt there really are very many people who feel that way.)

Balance to the table. If you do that, do any of these "problems" still exist?

What on earth does that even mean? I legit don't see how that sequence of words cashes out as...anything. As far as I can tell, it's as useful a design guide as "balance to the cheese."

What else? Ah, yes, "imbalance is mandatory for certain types of fun". Thus, *enforced balance* / systems without unbalanced elements, are less fun overall. But even they require informed consent - the players should know what they are getting into (even if that is "the unknown").

What kinds of fun are these, that don't boil down to "I need someone to be in an inferior position to me before I can actually have fun"? Because, as noted, that's a seriously toxic form of "fun" that I genuinely think should be ejected from game design. Not all reasons for having fun are appropriate to tabletop gaming--competition is obviously a form of fun, but has no place in a cooperative game. (Barring tournament modules, but that's a pretty rare form of D&D entertainment these days--and one that actually depends on there being some reasonably strong balance so that you can meaningfully say each tourney group had the same start position.)

IOW: When, exactly, does enforced imbalance create more appropriate kinds of fun? Because you have to choose which kinds of fun you support. You cannot catch 'em all. You're acting like including imbalance costs nothing but adds much, when in truth it is a trade-off, and I'd argue a very costly one.

What if an RPG came with chess clocks, and what was balanced wasn't "how much you contribute", but "how much you cost the group by contributing"?

Sounds like a great way to generate real-world player-vs-player arguments to me. It means that players who are simply faster-thinking, or who have a better memory, etc. will be massively favored over other players, and it will start to show extremely quickly if your example turn is a typical scenario. It would be like conditioning social skills on a player's actual ability to lie, or act, or the like--you'll be driving home differences between your players in a way that produces tangible benefits and detriments. I have known fellow players who were dyscalculic or dyslexic, who often had to rely on others to make sure they were using the rules correctly; they would be severely limited in a system like this. As would gamers with ADD. Game design that makes player disabilities a problem, rather than a non-issue, is...well, I don't recommend it if you can avoid it.

If you want to talk mechanical balance, you can look at it this way:

If your game has 10 classes, and 2 of the classes can do their job, but also be just as good, if not better than, the jobs of the other 8 classes, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

If your game has 10 classes, and 1 or 2 of those classes can regularly, by X level, put out more damage than the other 8 or 9 classes combined, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

An oversimplified model, but not wrong. The trick is developing statistically testable goals, and then rigorously testing whether those goals are actually met. Of course, not all goals are easy to translate into a statistical statement, but many are, since the three major components of game design are mechanical (which is inherently numeric for almost all games), dynamical (the "process of play"), and aesthetic (the "user intent" aspect--not aesthetics in the sense of beauty but in the sense of the "itches" that a game scratches). Even the aesthetics in the strict sense, e.g. do Fighters feel Fighter-y, is at least somewhat amenable to statistical testing (if you make real surveys and not frickin' push polls...)

Funny. We have a sorc in my game. Who feels our paladin outshines him completely. <snip> Meanwhile the paladin steamrolls through the daemons.

So...assuming you're talking about 5e...one of the strongest classes, which is also at least a partial spellcaster, put up against an enemy type it is specifically designed to be powerful against, is doing better than a full-caster trying to affect an enemy type specifically designed to be strong against the most common forms of attack from that full-caster.

What, exactly, is "funny" about this? Again, assuming you're referring to 5e, there's literally nothing surprising about this. Now, if this is Pathfinder or 3.x, it would be more than "not surprising at all," but not totally shocking either. Because, again, you're literally pitting enemies designed to be hard to kill with standard elemental damage but easy to hurt with smites. That daemons are weak to paladins and not weak to the weakest form of sorcerer (presumably a non-mailman sorcerer) says...basically nothing about the overall point. If anything, all it shows is that the archetype hierarchy can still affect spellcasters, if they don't choose to play the right kind of spellcaster!

[NichG]

In the interest of saving space, I'm only quoting this part. Also, to avoid needless repetition: "spellcasting+" and related forms refer to spellcasters (Wizard, Cleric, etc.) and anything primarily like spellcasting (psionics, Incarnum, magic items that generate spell or spell-like effects and usually needing a spellcaster to craft them, etc.), while "non-spellcasting" refers to...everything else (mundane Fighters, non-UMD Rogues, etc.)

I'm glad you and I agree on both 2 and 3, and I accept your caveat for 3 in that sufficiently-simple systems can make it not apply...but D&D, and basically every game of comparable style and development (PF, 13A, retroclones, etc.), is not sufficiently simple. Now, for the two questions where we may not (probably not) agree.

1: I assert D&D-alikes force a power hierarchy of archetypes, unless players work (knowingly or not) to play rather sub-optimally. Smart players that put reasonable work into exploiting their resources will find some archetypes have a much lower participation "ceiling," almost regardless of at-table effects. Even with some access to spellcasting+, you have far greater space to play in, unequivocally. You get more game to play with, both in rules and in solutions. I.e., "rules" because like a fifth to a third of all mechanics are bloody spells/etc. And "solutions" because there are few to no effects available to non-spellcasting archetypes that aren't also available to spellcasting+ ones, but many effects that only spellcasting+ (in whole or in part) can access that non-spellcasting emphatically cannot. You have zip-zero-nada control over that as a player. If you prefer Herakles-type characters and you play PF, you either have to accept that you'll never be even comparably good to the tales of Herakles, or you have to choose to play a gorram spellcaster, as (more or less) said in that now-infamous blogpost by Mr. Bulmahn.

TL;DR: You aren't allowed to choose to participate equally, if you have preferences that don't match the game. And the game goes out of its way to avoid telling you this (and may even conceal it). Spellcasting+ archetypes always have greater freedom of choice than non-spellcasting archetypes; they can choose to "play down," but non-spellcasting archetypes cannot choose to "play up."

1 is a non-sequitur to me because that assumption that 'you must first define a preference that you will hold to no matter what, then smash that against the system and see where you end up' is not at all how I approach RPGs (nor would I suggest anyone approach RPGs that way). I'll go to a system, and a particular campaign, and ask 'what would be good to play in the context of this particular situation?'. If it's D&D and I want lots of options and an easy time, I am entirely empowered to choose a spellcaster to play - the system can't force me to participate less. There are many many things that won't work that I might like playing or be inclined to play - I can either leave those for other systems, or approach the game with the idea of 'I know that I'm challenging myself here'. I feel your explanation of point #1 here is really more to do with your point #3. I do have a problem if the game system says 'the coolest thing to do in this system is to be a Fighter' when it basically sucks. But I wouldn't say that e.g. non-casters sucking at all obligates me to play an ineffectual character.

If I were to approach a game of Mage with the desire to play a mundane, I think that would be inherently unreasonable, because it goes against the stated premise of the system. If it turns out that mundanes don't get anything in Mage to balance them against mages, that's perfectly fine, even if the system has rules for statting mundane characters. The reason its not unreasonable on the face of it to approach D&D with the desire to play 'the guy at the gym' at high levels has to do with miscommunication leading to erroneous expectations. Correct that miscommunication (by for example publishing explicit statements as to what is expected of characters at different level ranges, how things compare, etc) and I wouldn't have any problem with D&D saying 'yeah basically this is a game about cool magical stuff - that can be spells, items, supernatural martial arts, etc, but if you don't engage with that premise then you're missing the point'.

Now, that said, I do have preferences. However, those preferences are only weakly impacted by my choice of character class. I'm fine using a Swordsage base in order to play as a fallen deity, or play a 'wizard' entirely supported by Use Magic Device and a lot of Bluff. When it comes to whether or not I consider my participation effective, it has almost nothing to do with prowess at the tactical level, and almost everything to do with strategy-level scale reasoning and decision making about the scenario as a whole. If someone kills 30 enemies and I only mildly wound one, that doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that I correctly determined who should be approached as an enemy and who should be approached as an ally. Making those decisions correctly is what I consider to be the core of my participation, and while it's not totally system-neutral (divinations are indeed useful tools for that kind of thing), conversations can just as well be a much more powerful tool than spells.

As for 4: We just disagree then. I think it's quite easy for a system to interfere with the ability to play what you (generic you) wish to play, to feel the experiences you wish to feel. It does so by radically restricting the rule- and solution-space available to you, such that you may literally be unable to do what you want to do and still follow the rules. Herakles is one example, to be sure, but even Conan requires some pretty heavy optimization *and* DM buy-in just to exist, let alone survive even half of the adventures he went on, and that was back in the days when spellcasting+ had far more limitations than it does today.

Again it sounds like you're talking about point #3, not point #4 (which was about invalidating other players or players invalidating you). So I'm going to go back to my response about point #3, which is that if the system miscommunicates its expectations, this is bad, but if it communicates clearly then I have no expectation that all systems should cater to all experiences, styles, themes, etc. The best experiences are had, IMO, by identifying what is good in a particular system and playing heavily into that.

I don't expect D&D to support a Conan archetype. I might still try to pursue building a Conan archetype, but if I do that I'm going to do it with the understanding that what I'm trying to get from that gameplay experience is the optimization challenge. I'll be doing it to prove that, in fact, it's possible. If I just want to play Conan, there's Iron Heroes (or Black Company d20, or even Exalted).

[Calthropstu]

So...assuming you're talking about 5e...one of the strongest classes, which is also at least a partial spellcaster, put up against an enemy type it is specifically designed to be powerful against, is doing better than a full-caster trying to affect an enemy type specifically designed to be strong against the most common forms of attack from that full-caster.

What, exactly, is "funny" about this? Again, assuming you're referring to 5e, there's literally nothing surprising about this. Now, if this is Pathfinder or 3.x, it would be more than "not surprising at all," but not totally shocking either. Because, again, you're literally pitting enemies designed to be hard to kill with standard elemental damage but easy to hurt with smites. That daemons are weak to paladins and not weak to the weakest form of sorcerer (presumably a non-mailman sorcerer) says...basically nothing about the overall point. If anything, all it shows is that the archetype hierarchy can still affect spellcasters, if they don't choose to play the right kind of spellcaster!

I play pf, not 5e. He is gearrd towards dealing with outsiders (generally uses dismissal/banishment, blasts large target with disintigrate.)

But being lvl 15, needing a 13 on the die to affect the main baddie (sr 30 and he has a +2) means he fails to affect him at all (the guy has some bad luck at dice.)

Long story short, he has some pretty decent tools and utterly fails despite.being one of the "top tier" classes.

Meanwhile, the "tier 4" mows down derghodaemons and smashes the big guy virtually single handedly. (He may have purchased some one shots to boost him for this fight, but even so...)
I even buffed the damn thing for the fight. Didn't matter. The thing even had a purrodaemon with him. Splat.
(There were also a myiad of other forces, but I gave the party 13 elven fighters and a 17th lvl elven wizard for backup but used them to basically hold off the things forces so it didn't turn into an unwinnable drag-out fight.)

[ezekielraiden]

1 is a non-sequitur to me because that assumption that 'you must first define a preference that you will hold to no matter what, then smash that against the system and see where you end up' is not at all how I approach RPGs (nor would I suggest anyone approach RPGs that way).

So...you've never, not even once ever, heard of a person who just likes playing Fighters or Paladins or something, and will seek that out in most games they play if there's any reasonable approximation thereof? Because...yeah. Lots of people really do play that way. One such person is me.

If I were to approach a game of Mage with the desire to play a mundane, I think that would be inherently unreasonable, because it goes against the stated premise of the system.

Is this even vaguely comparable to D&D-alikes, where...there are lots of other explicit classes besides mages?

I wouldn't have any problem with D&D saying 'yeah basically this is a game about cool magical stuff - that can be spells, items, supernatural martial arts, etc, but if you don't engage with that premise then you're missing the point'.

Except that "supernatural martial arts" is Monk. Which is actually in the mundane camp. For some inexplicable reason. This is exactly the crap I'm talking about. Why does the Fighter exist, and continually get press, freely dev-generated descriptions talkinga bout how awesome it is, and tons of D&D players who love it, if D&D is fundamentally "not about that" and hasn't been for two of the last three editions?

Now, that said, I do have preferences. However, those preferences are only weakly impacted by my choice of character class.

Then, in my experience, you are somewhat unusual. There is a significant number of people who will never be happy unless they're playing an entirely non-spellcasting class explicitly labelled "Fighter" on their character sheet. They were a significant factor in 5th edition ending up the way it looked.

Again it sounds like you're talking about point #3, not point #4 (which was about invalidating other players or players invalidating you).

I'm not. The system itself equips spellcaster+ archetypes with vastly more tools than non-spellcasters. To use your own (snipped) example: anyone can have conversations. Only spellcaster+ archetypes can invalidate your ability to have a conversation in the first place, by simply reading someone's mind, sending an invisible all-seeing scout, conjuring up a targetable scanning screen, or literally asking the gods. Oh, and good luck as a mundane character trying to guarantee that that conversation you had was truthful...something that a spellcaster+ archetype can do with a single low (2nd) level spell.

That's absolutely what I was talking about--or at least trying to. If you play a non-spellcaster, there is at least one spellcasting class that can always do everything you wanted to do, but better. It's rarely (Cleric and Druid aside) all available to the same class, but...why would the games continually push the idea that Fighters are worth playing when Clerics can do literally 100% of what Fighters do, and yet also have WORLDS more tools? Everyone can, again to use your example, have conversations. Everyone, that's a fundamental of roleplaying. Why do we make classes that are LIMITED to the fundamentals, while having other classes that can do all the fundamentals, and yet also have a TON of extra stuff too?

I don't expect D&D to support a Conan archetype.

Doesn't really matter if you don't, because Gygax himself did, and several other people have also created their own versions, or have asked others to do so. A significant number of players think D&D not only can, but should (perhaps with some tweaking) represent Conan--in fact, not just Conan in general, but at various points in his life!

(There were also a myiad of other forces, but I gave the party 13 elven fighters and a 17th lvl elven wizard for backup but used them to basically hold off the things forces so it didn't turn into an unwinnable drag-out fight.)

Edit: Okay, I was...allowing my emotions to control my response. Long story short, the fact that you felt you needed a much higher-level elven wizard for backup, just to make the adventure "not automatically (but boringly) unwinnable," severely harms your case. It...makes it sound like the Paladin is only allowed to kick ass because she/he has a much more powerful Wizard running interference for him/her.

[NichG]

So...you've never, not even once ever, heard of a person who just likes playing Fighters or Paladins or something, and will seek that out in most games they play if there's any reasonable approximation thereof? Because...yeah. Lots of people really do play that way. One such person is me.

Yeah, I know of lots of different types of players out there, but what does this have to do with my personal answers to your questions?

IME, those people who come in with a strong image of what they want to be playing before they even get an idea of what the game is going to be about often find themselves miserable a short distance into the game. YMMV, but I'd strongly advise that fitting what you play to what you're playing will generally lead to a higher level of satisfaction and compatibility with the game than expecting the game to fit what you want to play. That applies not only for game mechanics and systems, but DMs. How many stories are there about someone bringing a rogue into an undead-heavy dungeon crawling campaign? If the DM doesn't say in advance 'this campaign is going to be about fighting lots of undead', then it's the DM's fault. But if the DM clearly says that in advance and the player still brings in a character who will be totally ineffectual, I'm not going to have much sympathy for the player.

Is this even vaguely comparable to D&D-alikes, where...there are lots of other explicit classes besides mages?

Except that "supernatural martial arts" is Monk. Which is actually in the mundane camp. For some inexplicable reason. This is exactly the crap I'm talking about. Why does the Fighter exist, and continually get press, freely dev-generated descriptions talkinga bout how awesome it is, and tons of D&D players who love it, if D&D is fundamentally "not about that" and hasn't been for two of the last three editions?

This comes down to the system doing a poor job of communicating what it actually is, which is the point we agree on. The devs of 3ed/3.5ed famously included intentional trap options in order to reward system mastery, something which I don't actually support. Then add splat books and diverse authorial patterns and so on, and the devs really can't be trusted to communicate about what the system actually is. Of course they can say what they had in mind, and to that extent their mental image was at best stable for a couple of years but didn't hold up to a decade of theorycrafting by the community.

That is to say, the Monk is not really supernatural martial arts by the standards of fully splatted out D&D 10+ years after its initial publication. Unarmed ToB character, Incarnum user, Oriental Adventures mix, even using Monk for a 2 level dip for X stat to Y purposes, etc. D&D tells you that the Monk is 'supernatural martial arts', and I won't defend it sending that message. But I don't think its inherently wrong for the Monk to exist in the system, or for straight Monk (or, even more broadly, any character based primarily on taking the attack action) to be generally at a lower tier of world-shaping ability than other options. I think it still can serve a purpose in the overall design space even so, especially given the diversity of players.

Then, in my experience, you are somewhat unusual. There is a significant number of people who will never be happy unless they're playing an entirely non-spellcasting class explicitly labelled "Fighter" on their character sheet. They were a significant factor in 5th edition ending up the way it looked.

I mean, I've played a couple of monks before. It's appropriate for a particular mood. The one in particular was a Doomguard who refused magical healing out of principle. It was a zany 3-shot mini-campaign, and I knew what I was getting into.

I've also played wizards, clerics, rogues, barbarians, swordsages, etc. I would make the choice to bring each out for a different kind of campaign, based on the table, the setting, etc. If we're doing high powered cosmic superhero action, then I'm going to be doing something like StP Erudite shenanigans. If this is 'rural civilians meet at an inn and have a not entirely voluntary exciting adventure', then other options will better fit that feel. I'm not going to want to play a wizard when the campaign ceiling for cosmic introspection is low, because no matter how effective or powerful the character is, I'm going to feel like there's not actually a way to explore what they'd rather be doing within the confines of the premise.

I'm not. The system itself equips spellcaster+ archetypes with vastly more tools than non-spellcasters. To use your own (snipped) example: anyone can have conversations. Only spellcaster+ archetypes can invalidate your ability to have a conversation in the first place, by simply reading someone's mind, sending an invisible all-seeing scout, conjuring up a targetable scanning screen, or literally asking the gods. Oh, and good luck as a mundane character trying to guarantee that that conversation you had was truthful...something that a spellcaster+ archetype can do with a single low (2nd) level spell.

I'm not really threatened by any of that. I find that it's less effective than actually paying attention and surprising the GM. Those kinds of tricks are in principle marginally useful, but its really easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by having rules text behind your reasoning. That 2nd level spell has SR, saves, other spells that render someone immune, etc - anything worth talking to is going to crush it. The thing that can't really be faked or taken away is being able to be confident enough even as a Lv1 Commoner talking to an overdeity during a prophethetic vision to come up with something to say on the spur of the moment that will actually make the overdeity think twice and change their plans.

For me at least, that kind of moment is where the real gaming is. The rest is props and backdrop.

Doesn't really matter if you don't, because Gygax himself did, and several other people have also created their own versions, or have asked others to do so. A significant number of players think D&D not only can, but should (perhaps with some tweaking) represent Conan--in fact, not just Conan in general, but at various points in his life!

I mean, it does matter if I don't because, as a result, I don't generally try to play Conan in D&D when I'm not looking for a challenge, and as a result I don't make myself miserable by holding expectations that the system won't meet...

If other people push 'hey, you can totally do this, if you fail its your fault', then it comes back to that whole miscommunication thing that I'm not defending. I agree it's a problem if D&D says 'hey, you can be Conan and it'll be great'. I don't agree that D&D has to let you be Conan and have it be great.

[Quertus]

@ezekielraiden - I really want to reply to your post, but there's a few misunderstandings we need to clear up first.

-----

"I really don't care much about the opinions of people whose fun requires other people forced into an inferior position."

I mean, I don't much care for them, either. And I'm batting for team Lawful Evil, so I'll guess I "don't care for them" more than you do.

But here's there thing: you're assuming that imbalance has to involve force, that people can only be forced into a state of imbalance. That's just plain wrong. Many people actively seek imbalance - at both ends / all points on the spectrum. Yes, my most iconic instantiation of seeking the low end was my Sentient Potted Plant, but probably the most prevalent examples are those who do not want to be forced to participate in the "talky bits", who take characters with no social skills - or who even create characters who are spectacularly unsuited to conversation (deaf and mute, brain-dead zombie, etc). Or, even more common, if slightly silly, people who do not want to be forced to participate in the "BBEG kidnapped your background character", who build orphans from destroyed villages.

And, to expand on something NichG said, some players (including me) care most about things that aren't represented in game mechanics (well, or at all). NichG's example of "the strategic layer", of "what questions are we asking, and how are answering them" is certainly one of the best examples, but not the only one. For some players who care about non-mechanical portions of the game, being "equal" (let alone "superior") can, at times, actively detract from their enjoyment of the game. For various reasons.

Some players care about the stories that they tell. And the story of a group of equals is a valid story… but it's only one of oh so many possible stories. The role of "an equal" is a valid role… but it's only one of many possible roles. Some players enjoy more variety to their stories / roles.

Many people seek out inequality in a game, for various reasons. Some systems make creating such imbalance more difficult than others.

-----

"Balance to the table. If you do that, do any of these "problems" still exist?"

"What on earth does that even mean?"

I'm so used to saying this uncontested… thank you for the opportunity to evaluate and expand upon my premise.

So, balance is a range, not a point. There us no such thing as a "balanced" character - there is only "balanced to this group". It's subjective. Some tables would consider a hyper-optimized Tainted Sorcerer BFC God Wizard to be not just UP, but not even contributing, because their entire concept of "balance" hinges on how much damage you deal.

Anecdotally (and anecdotes are 100% valid proof when explaining how something being subjective works), I had a character whose net contribution to the game was exactly 0 - and I couldn't get the group to comprehend my concern, because that wasn't part of their conceptual vocabulary.

So, each group measures balance differently. But let's ignore that, and pretend that there was one universal, measurable measure of a character. So, suppose I have a character whose UBI (Universal Balance Index) is 30. Is that character balanced?

We have no way to answer that question.

What we need to know is, what is the group's balance range, and what are the UBI of the other characters.

So, if the group has a balance range of 10, and the other characters are [25,27,32,35] or [33,35,37,40] or even [20,20,20,20], then the character is balanced to that group. Same balance range - 10 - but, this time, the group's UBI are [145,147,142]. The character with UBI 30 is clearly not balanced to the table.

-----

Once we get on the same page on these topics, then maybe we can have a productive conversation on the broader issues.

[Morty]

In all honesty? People who have gotten used to being just better than other people, purely due to their preferences being different from those other people? I have zero care for them. It's not petulant to ask for equal treatment from the game's designers, particularly when (as noted above) basically every game designer ever, of any game with even moderate popularity, at VERY least pays lip service to "balance" even if their work falls short. If your (generic your) fun is dependent on being just better-off than other players, maybe D&D-alike games that tell the players they're supposed to be very roughly equal contributors aren't for those players. Maybe that's a toxic cultural element that needs to be addressed. Maybe it's time we had a frank and open conversation between designers and players, to see if players actually do want such permanent, entrenched inequality, or if it's primarily lingering due to (sub)cultural inertia.

I think that's the clincher. And I don't think it's even just the players who desire to be superior to others at the table. I think that, while 3.X D&D is a very poorly-designed, mistake-riddled game, the imbalance between casters and non-caster is ultimately intentional on some level. The power fantasy of a super-wizard who solves problems and wrecks enemies while the Muggles gape is a major part of D&D. Later on, other spellcasters got the join the club. I mean, just look at the fiction for high-level characters. Descriptions of high-level wizards gush about how totally awesome they are, while descriptions of high-level fighters... on epic levels, the book manages so say they're "more than mere sword-swingers" okay. The notion that non-casting classes are there for people who can't or don't want to play the real ones is pretty deep-seated. I believe there's accounts of how people tried to sneak it into 4E.

[AdAstra]

Quertus, while I broadly agree with your assertion that some players seek imbalance, those examples don’t really work very well. Choosing to play a character unable to participate in a specific mode of play isn’t imbalance, it’s that player seeking mechanical enforcement for a behavior/archetype they were seeking to play. You don’t need class imbalance to play a mute character, you can just not talk. Even the most balanced systems allow you to make preposterously weak characters, just by making poor choices or ignoring abilities you have. Even if you handed a player a perfectly-built god wizard in 3e dnd, they could still decide to not cast a single spell, grab a sword, charge into melee, and get slaughtered accordingly.

Overall, while imbalance is not always detrimental, it’s far easier to create imbalance through gameplay than to remove it. And usually, it’s far more organic than fixing rules imbalances, which require rules-level tinkering, or other players holding back, or contrived situations/boons in most instances. A player who actively wants to be weak? They can just make poor decisions (on either a character-building or in-character level) on purpose, which rarely even requires effort.

[Mechalich]

I mean, it does matter if I don't because, as a result, I don't generally try to play Conan in D&D when I'm not looking for a challenge, and as a result I don't make myself miserable by holding expectations that the system won't meet...

If other people push 'hey, you can totally do this, if you fail its your fault', then it comes back to that whole miscommunication thing that I'm not defending. I agree it's a problem if D&D says 'hey, you can be Conan and it'll be great'. I don't agree that D&D has to let you be Conan and have it be great.

The thing is, a warrior who relies on strength and cunning is possibly the most common form of fantasy protagonist there is. If your fantasy kitchen sink system can't support that archetype properly then you have a problem, a big one. Fighter is the most commonly chosen D&D class - this is a statistical fact, 538 did a study and everything - so the fact that the Fighter class can't work in gameplay is a massive problem.

I think that's the clincher. And I don't think it's even just the players who desire to be superior to others at the table. I think that, while 3.X D&D is a very poorly-designed, mistake-riddled game, the imbalance between casters and non-caster is ultimately intentional on some level. The power fantasy of a super-wizard who solves problems and wrecks enemies while the Muggles gape is a major part of D&D. Later on, other spellcasters got the join the club. I mean, just look at the fiction for high-level characters. Descriptions of high-level wizards gush about how totally awesome they are, while descriptions of high-level fighters... on epic levels, the book manages so say they're "more than mere sword-swingers" okay. The notion that non-casting classes are there for people who can't or don't want to play the real ones is pretty deep-seated. I believe there's accounts of how people tried to sneak it into 4E.

At the end of the day wizard and warrior are unequal concepts. 'Trained combatant' simply does not have the same capability to manipulate the fictional world as 'master of the arcane arts.' Lots of fantasy fiction acknowledges this openly, and does not even pretend to one to one balance between the best warriors and the best wizards. Wizards tend to be rare, massively outnumbered, or simply shunted into the villain or adviser role rather than the center of the action. Even D&D initially accounted for this, as a becoming a high-level wizard required considerably more XP than becoming a high-level fighter and in the initial iterations of D&D fiction wizards (and magical abilities of any kind) were quite rare indeed. In the Dragonlance Chronicles - the cornerstone of early D&D fiction - magic is sufficiently rare that in many towns the party travels through Raistlin is the only wizard the populace has ever encountered. However, things changed gradually during the 1990s, due in large part to the growing popularity of FR, and D&D moved more and more towards a high-magic world in which wizards were all over the place and regular fights with wizards became common gameplay events. BGII included at least one high-level spellcaster antagonist in pretty much every dungeon.

The end result, by the time 3e came out, was an circle that could not be squared. High level spellcasters were everywhere, but at the same time so were almost entirely mundane characters. The FR example is again relevant: the most famous characters being Drizzt and Elminster, who despite both being very high level are nowhere near each other on the power scale. There was no real way to make both types play nice with each other. Any real solution required either A. turning the martials into superhero types or B. massively nerfing the spellcasters. However, either of those options was guaranteed to anger a massive portion of the playerbase, as experiments like Tome of Battle and later 4e proved, leaving WotC with no good options. 5e used a set of kludgy design compromises like bounded accuracy to try and maintain the illusion of balance, which is honestly probably the best option available.

[kyoryu]

'Trained combatant' simply does not have the same capability to manipulate the fictional world as 'master of the arcane arts.'

Not necessarily.

I mean, it's inherent that wizards can do stuff not bound by normal physics. That's kind of what they DO.

But there's a whole range for that, in terms of power, accessibility, frequency, reliability, etc.

I mean, just take "summon fire". That could be anything from "Sure, a mage can summon a small fire, but it takes an hour of prep, will exhaust him for the day, and still has a high chance of failure, and the side effects can be horrifying" to "a mage can summon meteor storm all day without breaking a sweat". Where you choose to put the mage on that scale is totally up to the game designer.

[Cluedrew]

In all honesty? People who have gotten used to being just better than other people, purely due to their preferences being different from those other people?

I mean... I feel like I have definitely seen these. Still I wouldn't call them a sizeable proportion of the wizard's defenders.

At the end of the day wizard and warrior are unequal concepts.

"Magic is limited only by your imagination, any thing you can imagine can limit it."

Which is to say: we actually get to set the value of both of these concepts, because its a fantasy world of our own creation. (And yes we cannot set them arbitrarily, but a level 20 fighter has nothing on some of the mythic warriors of old.) So if they are unequal concepts it is because we (or the authors of the work) decided they would be.

I write a lot of fantasy and one moment that really hit this home for me is when I had a fight scene between an armoured knight and a mage on top of a train (it was a magic train, but the setting was also just approaching its industrial revolution). And the knight was supposed to attack the mage and drive her off. So I was a little worried about that, because a magic user verses a guy who had some magic in his armour but still fought by swinging a stick around. Also had some ranged weapons but no time to get them out. The only hard limit I had on magic for that setting at the time is that it was always elemental. So yeah the fight wasn't even close, every attack the mage could throw out the knight had a reply for or could just ignore.

Fireball? Heavy armour with seals eats most of that, use a shield to cover your face if need be. Lightning will stay mostly to the conductive armour. Ice is weaker than steal. What sort of wind spell is going to do more than what the train's speed is already doing? Some sort of earth throwing spell might do it but that feels like it might take a bit longer to set up when you are rushing by the earth like that. I could just say the mage does it, but that would rapidly push magic so high it would break the setting. So the mage managed to cast a protective spell and jump off the train where the knight could not follow.

[Duff]

If you want to talk mechanical balance, you can look at it this way:

If your game has 10 classes, and 2 of the classes can do their job, but also be just as good, if not better than, the jobs of the other 8 classes, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

If your game has 10 classes, and 1 or 2 of those classes can regularly, by X level, put out more damage than the other 8 or 9 classes combined, then you have a mechanical balance issue.

I'm going to disagree on the your 2nd point - There's a few ways the characters can (satisfactorily in my opinion) be balanced.

The first being non-damage contributions. If my character gets the enemy in a wrestling grip while yours pounds on it until it's defeated, I'm going to say there's no balance issue (for that fight).
The second, as alluded to, is different contributions in different fights. If my wrestler is contributing more in most fights (say, by locking one enemy down completely while still killing it almost as quickly as your sword swinger, but there's enough fights with ghosts I can't grab etc, then we get balanced out across the adventure or across the campaign. Some will find that problematic, but I think most of us are OK with that to a high extent
Then there's non-combat roles. I know if my character is the party "face" or gets to do the scouting, I have no problem with my role in combat being a "supporting act". Again, this sort of balance won't work for everyone all the time.

I'm going to suggest if you're not happy with both of the first 2 to quite a large extent, you're asking for a very restricted system/play style where characters either all have the same set of "tools" or the GM designs every encounter to carefully make everyone's different tools equally relevant in each encounter.

The last one is certainly going to vary more depending on the amount of scouting the scouts do for the party, how deeply the social scenes get roleplayed, as well as how much you enjoy (watching other members of your group do that) and (your ability to read the GTPG forum while that's going on).

[Mechalich]

Not necessarily.

I mean, it's inherent that wizards can do stuff not bound by normal physics. That's kind of what they DO.

But there's a whole range for that, in terms of power, accessibility, frequency, reliability, etc.

I mean, just take "summon fire". That could be anything from "Sure, a mage can summon a small fire, but it takes an hour of prep, will exhaust him for the day, and still has a high chance of failure, and the side effects can be horrifying" to "a mage can summon meteor storm all day without breaking a sweat". Where you choose to put the mage on that scale is totally up to the game designer.

As you note, the wizard concept will always be broader than the warrior concept. That's the fundamental inequality. It's true that if you keep sufficient limits in place that versatility need not overpower the warrior concept. Unfortunately, doing the latter is hard because you really, really have to limit the wizard concept carefully and many of the most useful nerfs, like prep time, function poorly with gameplay desires (people really want their wizard to actually be able to use some kind of magical attack). The heart of the problem is that many fantasy concepts traditionally have access to extremely powerful abilities - shapeshifting is a good example - that are superpowers all by themselves and taking them away or limiting them means you can't play traditional concepts.

There's also the worldbuilding issue, which bleeds over into the design issue, especially as a legacy aspect. Wizards and other spellcasting types are traditionally very rare, while warriors are quite common. Wizards are also traditionally rather disinterested in the normal aspects of temporal power because they're off playing in other dimensions and such, while warriors very much want to conquer and rule. As a result fantasy worldbuilding has a long tradition of placing a handful of mighty wizards in distant towers being generally meddlesome but not distorting the world, but when you try to place the warriors on a scale that goes from zero to Heracles you get a straight up superhero setting with all the issues that entails. And while some forms of fantasy have been willing to go all-in on superheroes, D&D and many similar properties seem determined to resist it.

"Magic is limited only by your imagination, any thing you can imagine can limit it."

Which is to say: we actually get to set the value of both of these concepts, because its a fantasy world of our own creation. (And yes we cannot set them arbitrarily, but a level 20 fighter has nothing on some of the mythic warriors of old.) So if they are unequal concepts it is because we (or the authors of the work) decided they would be.

Okay, yes, you can develop magical and martial systems that are equal, but you cannot do that in a fantasy kitchen sink. So yes, one can balance those concepts in other systems, but you can't make it work in D&D because the kitchen sink demands wizard occupy a design space larger than warrior.

D&D, and pretty much any fantasy that attempts to produce the standard quasi-medieval world while allowing for high magic, is carrying around a sort of inherent conceptual dissonance. However, it seems like to some degree this dissonance is what the customer wants.

I write a lot of fantasy and one moment that really hit this home for me is when I had a fight scene between an armoured knight and a mage on top of a train (it was a magic train, but the setting was also just approaching its industrial revolution). And the knight was supposed to attack the mage and drive her off. So I was a little worried about that, because a magic user verses a guy who had some magic in his armour but still fought by swinging a stick around. Also had some ranged weapons but no time to get them out. The only hard limit I had on magic for that setting at the time is that it was always elemental. So yeah the fight wasn't even close, every attack the mage could throw out the knight had a reply for or could just ignore.

Fireball? Heavy armour with seals eats most of that, use a shield to cover your face if need be. Lightning will stay mostly to the conductive armour. Ice is weaker than steal. What sort of wind spell is going to do more than what the train's speed is already doing? Some sort of earth throwing spell might do it but that feels like it might take a bit longer to set up when you are rushing by the earth like that. I could just say the mage does it, but that would rapidly push magic so high it would break the setting. So the mage managed to cast a protective spell and jump off the train where the knight could not follow.

This sounds like your wizard isn't being creative. If you can produce fire for any sustained period of time you can superheat the air. Superheated air is one breath = death for human beings. Ice can freeze the train surface turning it into a grease slick so the knight falls off. Wind sheer from another direction could easily be destabilizing since you can't brace in two directions at once.

[NichG]

The thing is, a warrior who relies on strength and cunning is possibly the most common form of fantasy protagonist there is. If your fantasy kitchen sink system can't support that archetype properly then you have a problem, a big one. Fighter is the most commonly chosen D&D class - this is a statistical fact, 538 did a study and everything - so the fact that the Fighter class can't work in gameplay is a massive problem.

The disagreement is as to the nature of the problem. I think its completely valid to have a fantasy RPG system that says for example 'Conan archetypes work in power range 1-3, Hercules in 3-5, Merlin archetypes in 4-7, Gandalf/Sauron in 6-12, etc'. It doesn't matter how common Conan is in other fantasy - each system gets to do its own thing and explore its own space, and is under no obligation in my eyes to carry forward all of the assumptions that came before.

The Fighter class can absolutely work in gameplay. If you play a Fighter with the expectation of having a character whose mechanics are particularly simple and don't require much expertise to apply consistently, you can receive that. If you play a Fighter with the expectation of being a strong contributor to tactical combat in a game whose level range is 1-6, you can receive that. If you play a Fighter with the expectation that you're going to have an uphill optimization battle at high levels and engage with that battle (resulting in ubercharger-like shenanigans, for example), you can receive that. If you look at Fighter and say 'this is a class which fundamentally buys extra feats at the cost of being mediocre otherwise', and use it as a dip to augment a build, you can receive that.

But it doesn't work in gameplay if you have prior expectations that the system isn't going to meet, and then approach the game with the belief that your expectations should count for more than what the system actually is. That could be all sorts of things, because players bring in all sorts of baggage: maybe they think that Chuck Norris should be able to beat up Sauron (see, e.g., the katanas meme and the section of the fanbase that wants them to be able to cut through tanks), maybe they think that the top end power for casters is going to be Merlin rather than Sauron and so having someone who hits things skillfully will be enough, maybe they think that taking Fighter will end up with them being Cu Chulainn rather than being Bruce Willis in Die Hard, maybe they think that systems are designed so that every option delivers equal performance for the same level of optimization investment, etc.

The system has some responsibility to communicate what it's options actually are about. D&D does this poorly, and I won't defend the explicit design choice to have trap options and things like that. However, it's not the fault of the designers that the D&D playerbase brings in a lot of baggage from outside and some players are more stubborn about taking the system at its word that 'this will not work' than others. As long as the system makes some attempt at correctly establishing what it actually supports, I don't think it's good for it to bend over backwards to meet external expectations.

If D&D said on the tin: 'this is a game which supports a range of scales, from the low-end of quests of daring and martial prowess, to the high-end of god-wizards shattering the rules of reality', then I have no problem with it making 'wizard' simply operate on an arbitrarily different power scale than 'fighter'. I find a system that says 'there are all sorts of ranges of power in the cosmos, and with this system you can choose to play at any of them (but, specific themes apply at each range)' to be a compelling design target, much more so than e.g. 4ed's 'you can have a martial power source or a magical power source or a demonic power source, but really they're all more or less equally potent'. If someone who sells their soul to a devil for power isn't actually any more powerful than someone who picks up a sword and trains for 10 years, then it undermines what makes that kind of premise interesting. I can agree it would be unfair to players if 3 were forced to play mundanes and the 4th got to sell their soul, but there need be no such compulsion. You can have a campaign of 4 mundanes, or a campaign of a risen demon, a soul-seller, a wizard who has uncovered Atlantean reality-warping secrets, and the chosen of a god, or even a campaign that freely mixes those things but where the players are all on the same page as to the fact that that's what their choices mean.

[Lord Raziere]

If D&D said on the tin: 'this is a game which supports a range of scales, from the low-end of quests of daring and martial prowess, to the high-end of god-wizards shattering the rules of reality', then I have no problem with it making 'wizard' simply operate on an arbitrarily different power scale than 'fighter'. I find a system that says 'there are all sorts of ranges of power in the cosmos, and with this system you can choose to play at any of them (but, specific themes apply at each range)' to be a compelling design target, much more so than e.g. 4ed's 'you can have a martial power source or a magical power source or a demonic power source, but really they're all more or less equally potent'. If someone who sells their soul to a devil for power isn't actually any more powerful than someone who picks up a sword and trains for 10 years, then it undermines what makes that kind of premise interesting. I can agree it would be unfair to players if 3 were forced to play mundanes and the 4th got to sell their soul, but there need be no such compulsion. You can have a campaign of 4 mundanes, or a campaign of a risen demon, a soul-seller, a wizard who has uncovered Atlantean reality-warping secrets, and the chosen of a god, or even a campaign that freely mixes those things but where the players are all on the same page as to the fact that that's what their choices mean.

I would only accept this if we got a second fighter class that was just as powerful as wizard as well as the normal fighter. even this is no excuse.

[kyoryu]

If only there was a thing in D&D already that denotes overall power and scale of characters.

OH WAIT.

But fundamentally, I think the issue is that there's two (probably three) divergent goals/wants/needs in mind here:

1) "I want to play a game where I can play a broad range of archetypes, and feel that I am contributing meaningfully."
2) "I want to play a game where wizards are clearly superior to martial types, even if that means martial types cannot meaningfully contribute"
3) "I want to play a game where I can outshine the rest of the party."

Goal #1 is not compatible with #2 and #3 (well, theoretically #1 and #3 could be compatible, but I've never really seen a game where martial types outshine magical ones).

Ultimately WotC has to choose which game they're making, and which audience they'd rather have. Frankly, for a broad game like D&D, I think that the first choice is "correct". That will alienate some people, sure, but for a broad game, I think I'd rather alienate "people that want to outshine the rest of their cooperative group" rather than "people who want to be able to meaningfully contribute to a game."

(I'd also note that the games that DO have such disparity, such as old school D&D and Ars Magica, also have slightly different structures that mitigate this issue to some extent).

[Mutazoia]

I write a lot of fantasy and one moment that really hit this home for me is when I had a fight scene between an armoured knight and a mage on top of a train (it was a magic train, but the setting was also just approaching its industrial revolution). And the knight was supposed to attack the mage and drive her off. So I was a little worried about that, because a magic user verses a guy who had some magic in his armour but still fought by swinging a stick around. Also had some ranged weapons but no time to get them out. The only hard limit I had on magic for that setting at the time is that it was always elemental. So yeah the fight wasn't even close, every attack the mage could throw out the knight had a reply for or could just ignore.

Fireball? Heavy armour with seals eats most of that, use a shield to cover your face if need be. Lightning will stay mostly to the conductive armour. Ice is weaker than steal. What sort of wind spell is going to do more than what the train's speed is already doing? Some sort of earth throwing spell might do it but that feels like it might take a bit longer to set up when you are rushing by the earth like that. I could just say the mage does it, but that would rapidly push magic so high it would break the setting. So the mage managed to cast a protective spell and jump off the train where the knight could not follow.

Unless said armour had heat sinks and built in refrigeration, your "seals" are not going to be eating squat...unless they are actual seals (with fur and flippers, but that's only going to help if your mage castes Fish ball). Nothing like being trapped in a super-heated metal box to make your knight into a broiled lobster. Ice is the same. Ever touch your bare finger to a piece of metal that has been super cooled, only to have it stick, and your flesh peeled off? (I sure hope not.) Imagine your dangly bits in that flash-frozen cod piece. Hell mix the super heated metal from the Fireball, with the now suddenly super-cooled Ice attack and see what happens to that steel suit of armour now.

But this is all moot, as you are talking about a story, and we're discussing RPGs. Quite different animals. In a story, your characters are as strong or as weak as you want them to be. In an RPG, your characters are as strong, or as weak, as the rules make them.

[NichG]

I would only accept this if we got a second fighter class that was just as powerful as wizard as well as the normal fighter. even this is no excuse.

I mean, its entirely possible that a game might not be able to give you the particular gaming experience that you want to have. I think that would be a reason to not choose to play that system, but I don't think its a fundamental criticism of the game's design - that is, I don't think its wrong to design a game that won't satisfy all possible players.

[Quertus]

Quertus, while I broadly agree with your assertion that some players seek imbalance, those examples don’t really work very well. Choosing to play a character unable to participate in a specific mode of play isn’t imbalance, it’s that player seeking mechanical enforcement for a behavior/archetype they were seeking to play. You don’t need class imbalance to play a mute character, you can just not talk. Even the most balanced systems allow you to make preposterously weak characters, just by making poor choices or ignoring abilities you have. Even if you handed a player a perfectly-built god wizard in 3e dnd, they could still decide to not cast a single spell, grab a sword, charge into melee, and get slaughtered accordingly.

Overall, while imbalance is not always detrimental, it’s far easier to create imbalance through gameplay than to remove it. And usually, it’s far more organic than fixing rules imbalances, which require rules-level tinkering, or other players holding back, or contrived situations/boons in most instances. A player who actively wants to be weak? They can just make poor decisions (on either a character-building or in-character level) on purpose, which rarely even requires effort.

Choosing to play a character unable to participate in a specific mode of play is simply a form of imbalance that I believe easy to understand; choosing to globally "fail at character creation" apparently isn't part of some people's conceptual space. So it's intended as baby steps towards understanding, not as the whole of truth itself.

And I'm specifically *avoiding* throwing player skill into the mix. I am exclusively discussing creating stronger and weaker playing pieces.

But, in order to make "poor decisions on… character-building", there have to actually be optimal and suboptimal choices. There have to be components with different value to choose from. And that - the existence of these unbalanced components - is what I am advocating. (And what I failed to discuss in my previous post - now I need to go back and see if it was intentional or not)

I would only accept this if we got a second fighter class that was just as powerful as wizard as well as the normal fighter. even this is no excuse.

So, what if the Fighter were clearly labeled "suboptimal / useless after level X"? And what is there was a second "Fighter" class, labeled the "Demigod", that was balanced with the Wizard? It gets d4 HP, cannot wear armor, and you eventually get to choose from cool abilities like Flight, or the ability to open portals to other planes (for travel, or to allow allied minions to come and fight for you). Would you accept this?

If only there was a thing in D&D already that denotes overall power and scale of characters.

OH WAIT.

But fundamentally, I think the issue is that there's two (probably three) divergent goals/wants/needs in mind here:

1) "I want to play a game where I can play a broad range of archetypes, and feel that I am contributing meaningfully."
2) "I want to play a game where wizards are clearly superior to martial types, even if that means martial types cannot meaningfully contribute"
3) "I want to play a game where I can outshine the rest of the party."

Goal #1 is not compatible with #2 and #3 (well, theoretically #1 and #3 could be compatible, but I've never really seen a game where martial types outshine magical ones).

Ultimately WotC has to choose which game they're making, and which audience they'd rather have.

While the goals are not compatible at a given table, all 3 have been successfully implemented by 3e. That is, 3e allows you to play with any of those goals, or with any combination of those goals that is compatible.

Also, 2e (and some 3e tables) definitely has had martial characters outshine magical ones.

Lastly, I had a character who contributed exactly nothing. I damaged one opponent, before another character AoE one-shotted all the foes. I was the Wizard, the other character was a martial. And this wasn't D&D. So I've seen martials outshine Wizards in many systems.

[Cluedrew]

Okay, yes, you can develop magical and martial systems that are equal, but you cannot do that in a fantasy kitchen sink. So yes, one can balance those concepts in other systems, but you can't make it work in D&D because the kitchen sink demands wizard occupy a design space larger than warrior.

D&D, and pretty much any fantasy that attempts to produce the standard quasi-medieval world while allowing for high magic, is carrying around a sort of inherent conceptual dissonance. However, it seems like to some degree this dissonance is what the customer wants.

More I think people have gotten so used to this broken formula that no one questions it. And by no one I mean not enough people critically enough to force it to change, but I do and so do others. Put it a different way, would anyone really complain that much if the world we were supposed to be treating as real make sense?

This sounds like your wizard isn't being creative. If you can produce fire for any sustained period of time you can superheat the air. Superheated air is one breath = death for human beings. Ice can freeze the train surface turning it into a grease slick so the knight falls off. Wind sheer from another direction could easily be destabilizing since you can't brace in two directions at once.

Yes the mage is capable of producing fire for sustained periods of time. She has around 3 seconds which I wouldn't really count as a "sustained period". You don't have to brace against two directions of wind, because they will just mix and come at you from an in between direction. Combine it with the ice thing though and that might actually work. That would require two spells after thinking of the plan which... creativity takes time and the short time frame the mage has definitely is swinging the odds.

On the other hand I could just say the knight is good enough to keep his balance anyways... he's not just like the mage wasn't good enough to whip up those spells in the time she had. I could push either of these concepts higher.

But this is all moot, as you are talking about a story, and we're discussing RPGs. Quite different animals. In a story, your characters are as strong or as weak as you want them to be. In an RPG, your characters are as strong, or as weak, as the rules make them.

So in one case they are as strong as the narrative says they are and in one case they are as strong as the rules say they are? You are acting like rules are fixed and immutable, that the author of the system has less control over it than I do when writing a story. Both are created by people, we can change it. We can make it better.

PS. The armour totally has heat sinks, it has a tiny fire elemental in it. And it was designed in a world where the knight was expected to go head to head with magic users so it involves a lot of defences historical armour does not have.

On Levels: In agreement with some others, I think levels are the solution that has not been utilized to this problem. Levels, at least since they united the XP tables, are supposed to represent power level and the fact that they don't represents a failure in design to me.

[Calthropstu]

Edit: Okay, I was...allowing my emotions to control my response. Long story short, the fact that you felt you needed a much higher-level elven wizard for backup, just to make the adventure "not automatically (but boringly) unwinnable," severely harms your case. It...makes it sound like the Paladin is only allowed to kick ass because she/he has a much more powerful Wizard running interference for him/her.

Actually, the elven wizard just gave him a fly spell. He was there, but his single contribution was a prismatic spray to clear the area in front of the portal, and a pair of called angels to assist the elven fighters.
The healer cast a blade barrier to give the elven wizard some peace and after that he concentrated on altering the portal's destination from gehenna to the fae realm, killing 2 birds with one stone so to speak (the energies there flowing in would help repair the damage the daemons did to the forest.)
So nothing much else.
If things had gone south and the elven fighter line started going down letting in the main forces he would have boosted that, but he never needed to.

[FiberPilot]

The party never needs to be balanced, the game needs to be balanced for the party. It's part of a GM's job.