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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5146953" data-attributes="member: 87792">And who goes first.  That's a little extreme for an RPG.  Few short of Mage or Exalted let you break the laws of physics - and your party is equivalent to a martian, a hivemind, and a Cray Supercomputer.  On the other hand it might be possible to balance a similar game with characters with personality.  E.g. The Speculator gets to roll three dice and pick two, or to adjust one of his dice.  The Crooked Cop sends people to jail on any double unless they bribe him.  And the Scum Landlord gets d6*5 income per property from the bank every turn but on the roll of a six goes to jail. Once you've got sane-ish rules like that then balance (based on starting cash) is looking practical.  If we're going to give up on attempting something just because a perfect form is impossible, we can throw out truth, beauty, and justice as goals.  Thanks, but no thanks.  Except that BMX Bandit might be an inherently fun and interesting concept.  But not in games where someone else gets to play Angel Summoner.  The mere presence of Angel Summoner has destroyed what would be a number of fun and interesting ways to play the game. The one exception would be games like Ars Magica where the imbalance is made extremely explicit - and the player who signed up for BMX Bandit did so knowing there would be Angel Summoner there.  (The Buffy and Dr Who systems have good answers for this).All balance really is is providing accurate information on the expected in-game utility of the game elements.  And then providing this to the GM and PCs to make the choice (there's nothing inherently wrong with a mismatched party - as long as everyone knows in advance). A lack of balance means one of three things: 1: The game has been taken outside expected parameters, 2: The game designer didn't know enough about his own game to provide highly useful information, or 3: The game designer didn't care about providing information that would help the GM and the other players.  In the first case this might be bad, it might be awesome - but in both cases a different system would probably work better.  Cases 2 and 3 are inherently bad.</blockquote>

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