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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6323461" data-attributes="member: 17106">A game show. The same format is also commonly used by comedy clubs and theater groups. There are plenty of other similar games that revolve around making stuff up surrounding preset prompts of some sort.I'm referring to "playing house"; i.e. the archetypical game that young children engage in where they pretend to be adults and go through (frequently banal) daily activities.There are clearly some strategies that are better than others. There's also no real defined victory IIRC; it's simply a question of building whatever you like.The reason I picked those three is those are all types of games that exist well outside of the D&D world, yet have a lot more in common with D&D than strategy games or wargames. D&D is improvisational theater, it is open-ended exploration of a character, and it is a world simulator. There are many noncompetitive games that share a lot in common with D&D, and few if any of them have any conceit of any type of balance. The Sims. Charades. The list goes on and on.Of course, many competitive games also aren't balanced between participants/competitors. Take <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)" target="_blank">Mafia</a> for example; several defined (and totally unequal) roles create an engaging dynamic.And even games that do have a concept of competitive balance don't force participants to be equal; they just provide equal opportunity. For example, if I'm dominating the Scrabble scene by getting a Q on a triple word score every time, it doesn't mean that the letter Q is overpowered, it means that I understand the rules better (or have memorized more words that start with Q), which is how you win in Scrabble. If Usain Bolt keeps winning races, that doesn't mean the races are unbalanced, it means he's faster than everyone else. System mastery in D&D (say, picking out optimized Polymorph forms) is essentially similar to skill training for competitive games.What about good ol' basketweaving? Is that supposed to be on the same level as using a sword? Trying to balance apples and oranges is doomed to fail. Even adopting a very limited, restrictive, dungeon-based setting still opens D&D up to a variety of capacities that will never be balanced with each other. A point in performance can't really be compared with a point in a saving throw to the level of rigor that would be required to enforce that level of balance. Likewise, a druid can't really be compared with a rogue to that degree.So...if magic is restrained, everything's fine right? I mean, no one anywhere is arguing for unrestrained magic (which to me, sounds synonymous with at-will spells, so maybe someone is).What you're referring to as asymmetry however, while it may be a perfectly good model for wargames, is not appropriate for a roleplaying game. A roleplaying game is about the characters, not the players, and should be judged in terms of the characters' world and not the players' experience. The players certainly aren't competing with each other (unlike with a wargame), so as  [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] notes, balance between them is irrelevant.</blockquote>

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