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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5752000" data-attributes="member: 54877">Some balance issues are indirect, and thus difficult to notice at first.&nbsp; And not infrequently, those issues have symptoms that you might address well enough some other way.&nbsp;For example, I had a 3E campaign with 9 characters.&nbsp; The wizard took a couple of levels of monk, which kept the worst of the overpowered spells out of the campaign until the very end.&nbsp; The cleric took a prestige class and spent a lot of time buffing other people.&nbsp; The lady playing the druid couldn't make some sessions, and spent the whole campaign 2-4 levels behind everyone else.&nbsp; (Later, we changed it to no more than 2, because more than that was intolerable.&nbsp; But 2 behind was still pretty effective.)&nbsp;None of that was done for balance.&nbsp; It just worked out that way.&nbsp; So the mainly fighter (about 1/3 rogue levels) and mainly rogue (about 1/3 fighter levels) were reasonably effective by comparison, even in the higher levels.&nbsp; What they didn't have was any room to branch out like the other characters, into prestige classes or other stuff.&nbsp; This they didn't like.&nbsp; The complaint was, &quot;we don't get to expand our scope enough.&quot;&nbsp; Heck, decding to have both of them multiclass on those ratios was the only thing that kept it tolerable.&nbsp; Part of that was the type of players, and part was the shock of playing 3E after Fantasy Hero, but mainly they saw everyone else getting a wider range of things to do and felt left out.&nbsp; They had to stay narrow to keep up.&nbsp;It was thus ultimately a balance issue, though a subtle one.&nbsp; Had the player of the druid (two thirds of the sessions) gone with fighter/rogue and the player of the fighter/rogue (every single session) gone with the druid, it would have gotten out of hand in a hurry.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5752000, member: 54877"] Some balance issues are indirect, and thus difficult to notice at first. And not infrequently, those issues have symptoms that you might address well enough some other way. For example, I had a 3E campaign with 9 characters. The wizard took a couple of levels of monk, which kept the worst of the overpowered spells out of the campaign until the very end. The cleric took a prestige class and spent a lot of time buffing other people. The lady playing the druid couldn't make some sessions, and spent the whole campaign 2-4 levels behind everyone else. (Later, we changed it to no more than 2, because more than that was intolerable. But 2 behind was still pretty effective.) None of that was done for balance. It just worked out that way. So the mainly fighter (about 1/3 rogue levels) and mainly rogue (about 1/3 fighter levels) were reasonably effective by comparison, even in the higher levels. What they didn't have was any room to branch out like the other characters, into prestige classes or other stuff. This they didn't like. The complaint was, "we don't get to expand our scope enough." Heck, decding to have both of them multiclass on those ratios was the only thing that kept it tolerable. Part of that was the type of players, and part was the shock of playing 3E after Fantasy Hero, but mainly they saw everyone else getting a wider range of things to do and felt left out. They had to stay narrow to keep up. It was thus ultimately a balance issue, though a subtle one. Had the player of the druid (two thirds of the sessions) gone with fighter/rogue and the player of the fighter/rogue (every single session) gone with the druid, it would have gotten out of hand in a hurry. [/QUOTE]

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