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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6792653" data-attributes="member: 996">It's good for collective storytelling.  Most stories are written by a single author.  If the author creates an ensemble cast instead of a lone hero, though, there's likely some 'spotlight balance' among them.  Each will have a specialty or a moment to shine, even if the author 'forces' the latter.  I can't agree.  D&D characters deviate pretty substantially from the sorts of capabilities displayed by protagonists in the fantasy genre.  In part to make archetypes playable as part of a team, while fiction tends towards the lone hero or hero + sidekicks (and, perhaps, a mentor).  Though also in part just due to the perpetuation of system eccentricities as sacred cows. In a game (even a storytelling game), rather than a single-author story, balance keeps everyone on the same page and helps them avoid accidentally stepping on or overshadowing eachothers' characters.  No degree of balance is sufficient to prevent intentionally wrecking the game for others, though decent balance makes that intent pretty obvious.  For any FRPG campaign to be successful for more than one of the participants, some balance is required.  It can be supplied in part by the system as a baseline, it can be enhanced by player restraint and consideration for eachother, and it can be engineered and even outright forced by the DM.  If a group is on the same page to begin with and considerate of eachothers' enjoyment, they'll naturally seek balance, that balance won't need to come from the system and may even seem 'invisible' since it's coming naturally.  Similarly, if a group has a single dominant personality leading it, lack of balance is essentially invisible as long as it favors the dominant participant.  5e works extremely well in both sorts of cases - the latter, particularly, when the group's dominant personality is the DM.That is a bad phrasing, yes.  Sticking to a format and defining jargon terms improves clarity, and it does result in a book that's a better reference than a read.  D&D spell lists have always been like that, for instance, with a distinct format that spells(npi) out basic stats like range/area/save/components/etc.  Storyteller was a good example of the opposite extreme: the books were pleasant to read cover-to-cover and even inspiring at times, but were nearly useless when you tried to look up anything specific.  5e's penduluum-swing toward natural language makes it more pleasant to browse through, though I doubt it'd make much of a cover-to-cover read the way oWoD could be.  But natural language also makes it more problematic to interpret 'RAW' - which dovetails neatly with it's emphasis on DM-rulings over rules(as-written).  That's also consistent with any theoretical balance built into system being largely moot.  The system is what the DM makes of it - including balanced or otherwise - at his discretion. One of the best and most straightforward definitions of 'balance' in the context of games that I've heard is:  a game is balanced if it presents the players with enough choices that are both meaningful and viable.  People will often hold up a game with no choices or where all choices are essentially identical as a strawman of extreme 'balance' gone too far, but one choice or no meaningful choices are just as extremely imbalanced as many choices, only one of which is the obvious-best choice.  Those are fair examples of areas or ways in which an RPG might display some balance.  5e leans heavily on a DM-moderated version of "spotlight balance" from your list, for instance.  3.5/PF balance is submerged in a ocean of sub-par choices making for a deep, system-mastery meta-game, with balance an emergent quality among the Tier 1 classes and builds, so what you're calling "build balance," and, incidentally, some PvP balance.  4e delivered all but that last, PvP, form of balance, the roles it used to support narrative/spotlight/contributory balance being antithetical to PvP.As in another thread, I honestly think your DM is just "missing the point" of 5e in running it that way.   By-the-book & above-board is a good way to test a game, and a good way to play a game that has clear, consistent, balanced mechanics.  But, the playtest is over, and 5e chose natural language over clarity, differentiation over consistency, and tradition over balance.  The result is wonderfully evocative of classic D&D, and wide-open for DMs to get creative and have fun with.  But running it RAW as if it were 3.5 or above-board as if it were 4e can result in some really negative play experiences.  That could deliver a more 3.5 sort of experience.  Maybe they figure there's no point with PF already catering to that audience?Then again, all classes cast spells.  OK, Monks & Barbarians don't exactly literally /cast/ them, per se, and yes, there are a handful of entirely non-casting sub-classes.  But, if you don't have the toys, it's because you decided not to play with them, not just because of your choice of class.Video games and RPGs need to be balanced in different ways.  RPGs, if anything, require more and more robust balance than video games - but, they also have GMs who can compensate when mechanical balance fails.And nothing kills that engagement faster than severe imbalance.  The moment you realize that what your character does doesn't matter, *pop*, it's gone.  The 'engagement' that is, not the character, though it might as well be.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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