Balance? Balance?! We don't need no stinkin' balance!
Greetings...
BardStephenFox said:
"I'm going to charge across the balcony and knock the flower box onto the guards below. As I reach the end of the balcony, I will leap out, swing on the flagpole, sommersault off and kick the captain of the guard onto the ground. Landing above him, I will draw my rapier and hold it at his throat.
'One wrong move Captain Ortiz and I will silence you forever, now order your men to release those peasants.'"
The more reserved player might follow up with "Um, I move to the rail. Then if I can I will cover the guards below with my crossbow."
Without a strong cohesion in the rules, the vocal player might consistently overshadow everyone else. As a DM, you would look out for that sort of thing and try to keep it in check. But let's be honest, a vocal player with cool cinematics is easy to give a little more rope.
3.x doesn't prevent this from happening. Vocal players can still steal the spotlight if the DM allows. But the mechanics create an environment where it is easier to identify and remember that a sequence of events might take a little more time and you should maybe let the first player run across the 30' balcony, knock the flower box off onto the guards below. *stop* Let another player take a turn and continue the next round.
Now, as Mallus suggests, this can sterilize your games. They key is to use the mechanics to improve the game. If your group is into swashbuckling and derring do and _everyone_ is participating, give them more rope. If you want to encourage that behavior, add a derring-do action to the standard action & move action sequence. If you want momentary snatches of heroism, at fate points or swashbuckling cards. Just be consistent and make sure each player is getting that spotlight.
"Balance" is both an external thing, in the baseline rules, and an internal thing, among your group. I think the basic rules do a good job establishing a common baseline for each D&D player using the ruleset. This is something that previous editions were less oriented toward. But I think the goal of all that baselining was to make it easier for run a "basic, balanced game." It reduced the rules arguements around some tables because a lot of things were better defined. That is a good thing. It is also a good starting point for individual groups to grow from.
There will always be people that will work within the rules better than others. Good DMing is still required. I think the current version of the rules provides a stronger framework for beginning DMs to work toward become good or even great DMs.
Thusly, this goes to prove why 7th Sea is a great game, and Swashbuckling Adventures d20 sucks bilge water. But seriously...
Well, the way I see it is there are two types of balance, and you touched on both. Mechanical balance, and Play balance. Largely, you've talked about play-balance here. Where a GM shouldn't let one player too have too much of the spotlight. Even in a game like 7th Sea where they encourage you to do daring swashbuckling moves, like the one described above, the GM always has an obligation to the other players who might not be so vocal. To ask what they want to do. But this is true of all games, regardless of mechanics.
The second is of course mechanics and character balance. Where the characters will develop evenly in conparison with the other character classes. Is this fair and honest? Well, on the whole, yes. Generally, the situations that the characters face don't even have to be a plethera of problems where each character is allowed to shine, because XP is still shared equally.
But, personally, I like to give campaigns where players are allowed to each allowed to have the spotlight for a while. But I will also center a campaign around one particular character, so that player X will be the main hero for this campaign. But players Y and Z can have momentary spotlights upon them for particular scenes.
Now...is it my opinion that never should balance of any sort ever get in the way of playability and player's enjoyment. If a player wants to do that swashbuckling move in D&D, yeah, great...just make sure that they understand they will have to do it move-by-move, because D&D mechanics can't handle multi-actional moves and not become discouraged by the slowness of the entire series of rounds. Now, I don't know how action points work, I'll read up on it sooner or later...
If a player wants to do an action that is not detailed in the rules, well...by all means, the DM should encourage players to come up with creative solutions. The general mechanics of the game with difficulties and skills should be enough to allow most DMs to come up with mechanics on the fly to handle the situation. This is something that is at the core of the D&D system now, and as more and more rules come out, it should always boil back down to One Skill + One Stat Bonus + d20 vs a Difficulty. If it doesn't then it's becoming needlessly complecated.
When I first looked at D&D3.0, I thought *great!* Here we have skills and feats. Skills dictate actions and abilities that characters can do, and can improve upon. Where as feats are those actions and abilities that they can't really improve upon. You can either fight two-handed, or you can't
But the game I think has become too bloated with feats. Not enough skill points are given to characters, and too few feats are given as well. Now, I could rant about this...but I'll save it for another post..
Now, isn't there a rule to handle when people want to act out of turn on initative? If there isn't, then it must have been a houserule I came up with, or a houserule I read somewhere. Well, I can't seem to find anything in the SRD, and the more I think about it, maybe it was something I thought up but never wrote down. -- The idea I had that characters could 'break' their initiative and do something at a higher initiative, but at the cost of minuses to succeed. So, if you were at say initiative 5 and wanted to hit a gnoll who is about to bash the unconscience wizard with a blunt object, who is going at initative 14, so our hero needs to go at initiative 15. Then they are at a -10 to all actions for the rest of the round, bumping up their initiative to 15. Next round, they have the benefit of being at initiative 15 now. If however, our hero wanted to jump in front of the way of a gnoll archer who's firing arrows from atop a crematorium at our indesposed wizard...well, they can do that too. Jump into the line of fire. But I would require a reflex check at -10. Failure means that the wizard doesn't get 90% or 100% coverage, but the gnoll still has to deal with 'in the line of fire' rule for missile weapons. So, there is still a chance that the gnoll might still hit our failed hero. I've never playtested this, nor seen what people think of it...
As for rule abusers...well, it's the job of the GM to keep them inline. There are always people who will bend and take advantage of the rules. But, should this be a penalty for players? People take advantage of situations all the time. Now, if you feel it does 'unbalance' the game. Well, then you should take steps to fix it. But if players start taking advantage of the rules, I generally don't penalize them for that. I usually give them XP bonuses if they do such things. But if they do it all the time, and 'unbalance' the game. Well, then I turn the tables on them, and start doing the same sort of things to them. At which time, they complain that it's unfair, or unbalanced, and we usually end up implementing a houserule to clean up the problem.
But let me ask this question. Does anyone else think it's balanced that the Wizard class, as well as a couple of other spellcasting classes, but mostly the wizard, have to spend XP to cast certain spells and create magic items? How does this balance against other classes that don't have to spend XP? Also, how balanced is it when wizards have to spend their treasure and earnings on spell components, and the other classes don't? -- Now, of course, some groups put a certain amount of money towards buying spell components for the wizard along with magical items for the other classes, and then divide the remaining for personal wealth. But I know some groups want all the treasure divided equally, and whatever cost the spellcasters incure upon themselves so they can cast powerful spells...well, so be it!
