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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1644374" data-attributes="member: 10201">On the flipside, the game designer is also only human, so there's no particular reason, IMHO, to assume the game designer has done any better job of balancing than the GM could. IOW, if you're really concerned about this style of play, don't you need to pore over everything anyway, because you never know when the designer screwed up?No, widely divergent power levels don't necessarily have anything to do with options, fun, or the ability of the characters (and thus players) to contribute. One way to get equal spotlight time for all players is for them to all play equally-powerful characters. But that's not the only way, and may not be the best way--since what you really want to balance is the players' fun, you're working through a proxy of a proxy doing it this way (degree of player contribution is a proxy for fun--not everyone needs to contribute equally to have equal fun--and character power is a proxy for player contribution). In some genres (supers) and with some playstyles (troupe-style), inherently unequal character power is not a problem, and may actually be a feature. The other problem of trying to ensure everybody has the same fun via character-power balancing is that it's so fragile. Take D&D3E as an example: all it takes to "break" the balancing mechanisms is play in a setting where violence simply isn't an option (royal court intrigue, perhaps), and suddenly the classes are wildly out of whack. It's much better to cut right to the real goal, and attempt to balance player fun or, at furthest remove, character contributions. And power level is not the only, or best, way to balance character contributions. In many genres/settings/playstyles, niche protection is actually the best way to do that. It doesn't matter if Batman is as good at picking a lock as Superman is at lifting things, it only matters that Batman is noticably better at picking a lock than Superman is at picking a lock, and the team-up works.See, now those aren't necessarily correlated. One character can have inordinate power, and yet her player doesn't get more spotlight time. And one player might get more spotlight time, and yet the others might still be having just as much fun--not everyone needs the same amount of spotlight time to enjoy themselves RPing, and some actually shy away from it.</blockquote>

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