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Message: <blockquote data-quote="J_D" data-source="post: 1646752" data-attributes="member: 20956">That it isn't Superman's job isn't enough?  That it's almost always better to gain entry quietly through picking a lock rather than making a big noise that will attract more trouble strains your believability?  It's too much to ask for Superman and Batman to work together as a team rather than Superman trying to do everything including things that Batman is more suited for?Well, if one player is going to be "just the right man" for an hour or more I could see people getting bored.  I've never heard of this happening, though, short of one person rudely trying to hog the spotlight while the DM and other players are unwilling for whatever reason to stop such poor behavior.  I've certainly never seen it in any group I've been in.  What I've seen more of is one or more players staying quiet and not participating of their own volition not because of boredom, but they just were quiet and low-key people in general, but that's a completely different thing.  As long as they're having fun, that's fine.Well, yes, that should go without saying.  That's what all groups should aspire to being, and when they don't attempt that then it's plainly and simply a bad group.  That's what Woodelf and I have been saying.  It's not the system that causes the problems, it's the players!  Trying to fix this by rigging the system with an artificial balance isn't really going to help much at all in the face of players like that.  If you think that a game designer can fix a system to avoid problems that have roots with poor players, you're pursuing a false hope.You've put your finger on the problem right there.  It's the players, not an unbalanced system, that's the problem!  Despite what they claim, players who are self-centered enough to hog the spotlight and outshine the other players are not good roleplayers.  You honestly think that those kinds of players are in the vast majority?  That's just sad.Conan and Spiderman are singular heroes in those movies.  Having a single hero works fine in a movie.  It doesn't work at all in a role-playing game unless there's only one player and the DM.  Role-playing games with more than one player simply have to be ensembles, team efforts, if they're going to work and be enjoyable.  The overall reason of fun is the same for both, but once you get to the details of the process of having fun a movie and an RPG are just different and you can't reasonably compare them.Let me get this straight.  You're telling me that the vast majority of games are ones where all the players are in competition with each other to see who can be the hero, who can get the most "screen time" and hog the most spotlight, rather than the players working together as a team to resolve the challenges and each having their moment but none trying to steal moments from someone else?  Perhaps I've been lucky to avoid that in my 25 years of gaming, and may that luck continue to protect me from ever finding such a pathetic group of players in the future!If you think that Woodelf and I are claiming to not want to play heroes, you've badly misinterpreted what we've been saying.  Of course we want to play heroic characters, characters that contribute to the resolution of the adventure.  What we're trying to say is that you don't need such fine-grained mechanical balance or artificially engineered equality of power between characters to do that!  Choosing a weapon that does d8 damage instead of d12 does not prevent that character from being a hero!  Having a group of one epic character and several low-to-middle level characters does not prevent the lower level characters from being heroes and having their moment!  To claim otherwise is just plainly and simply incorrect.  It's all in how the players role-play and work together as a team.  Maybe as you claim none but a "tiny minority" are capable of working together like this, but if so then it's a very sad commentary on the average gamer.And as as far as "majority of games should be developed for the majority of players" coupled with your low opinion of the majority of roleplayers, you think that games design should be targeted to account for the lowest common denominator?  There are few things in life I loathe and detest more than pandering to the lowest common denominator or putting consideration for the lowest common denominator above that for the average or above-average people.</blockquote>

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