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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5827207" data-attributes="member: 5143">It is....They are a spectrum.  You need to find a point on the spectrum that fits the best.  Allowing too much choice will destroy balance.  Too much balance will give you no choices at all.  The problem is, most people don't see this and are advocating absolute freedom of choice.  Which is absolute lack of balance.The Hero/Champions system is excellent.  I love it for the days I like to play with numbers and sit around for 4 or 5 hours coming up with a character concept and building it to exact specifications.  It allows you to build ANYTHING.  However, I can tell you from experience running it that if you follow the default options in the book and just say "You have 350 points, build a character", there will be next to 0 balance in the group.In fact, it's likely half of the characters will die in the FIRST ATTACK in the game.  As a bunch of them had character concepts like "The guy who can fly and was a scientist".  Build that character and put him up against Superman, and I can tell you that one punch splatters him.So, the process we normally go through when we introduce new players to Champions for the first time is: -Explain the system to them, it takes a couple of hours to explain the math to them and how to work with a system that allows them to build ANYTHING.-Make up a character.  It is normally completely broken and done wrong.-I give them baselines for damage and defenses, maximum points they can spend in 1 power, maximums they can put in defenses and attacks, and minimums they should put in defenses and attacks.  They remake their characters with these new restrictions.-I examine the characters, find as many mistakes as I can and show them how to fix them.  They rebuild their character.  I miss a bunch of mistakes because the system is complicated enough that unless you have a LOT of experience with it(which I don't), you miss stuff.-Play through a test battle with the characters, half of them will still die as they picked the minimums...which I set so that someone could have ONE weakness(That would likely be covered up by an advantage that negated the weakness), but they wanted to be a role playing character, so they picked the minimums for everything combat related.-Let them modify their characters for a while to make up for any mistakes they may have made and try again.  Possibly modifying a 2nd time after that(and possibly 3rd).This process tends to take about 6-12 hours, happens over a week or 2 and involves a couple of sessions of getting together.  Even after this process, if I make a mistake creating one of the enemies that they fight, I could wipe out the entire group accidentally because balance is so difficult to get right and there are so many factors because of the huge amount of choice you have.Champions is a system that is a headache to DM and that I have to continually balance myself.  I don't want D&D to become that as well(and it did somewhere around late 3.5e).I'd like the D&D experience to be much, much, much easier on the DM.  I want the process to be "Make up 4th level characters, we'll play for the first time on Friday".  As soon as we have to start discussing whether the game will be 20% social and 80% combat or 60% social and 40% combat and how many of your choices should be in which areas....it becomes a headache.Especially because I don't know when I start an adventure what the percentages will be.  I'm just going to run an adventure.  I'd like the characters to be able to handle all situations I throw at them.Edit: That means "forcing" players to have options in all areas of the game that are useful, whether they want them or not.  It also means denying players options that would allow them to OVER focus in one area.</blockquote>

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