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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5826088" data-attributes="member: 54877">That's one way balance can work (and not off topic at all).  Though I'd still argue that the more important balance is, the more important it is to get it right--which includes acknowledging areas of failure and/or environment ripping the rug out from under.  But you could just as easily have the same issues in other aspects.  Let's take something like the venerable charm person spell. Charming is something that, depending on edition, can work in combat spectacular well to not at all, do anything from minor help in a social scene to totally bypass it, and used a bit creatively, even help with exploration.  (The crudest form of the last one is the "charmed mine detector" sent down an innocuous passage suspected of having traps.) Long ago, I saw some fairly strong arguments that charm person as actually adjudicated in many games, should have been a 2nd level spell.  And not a few such arguments that put it at 3rd.  But of course, in early D&D, charm person could be something very appropriate at 1st.  Or it could be a nice sop to the poor 2 hit point mage that didn't have much of anything else (rolling for starting spells and scrounging from there).  Meanwhile, history has shown us that old 1st level stand bys such as read magic deserved their eventual location of cantrip or basically free ability. With spells, it's not that hard to move them up or down a level to work around group style (though it could be easier and less crude a measure).  With class abilities, skills, etc. it gets a bit more dificult.  And of course, a lot of such underpowered/overpowered issues are not discrete items, but the synergy of several.</blockquote>

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