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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Odhanan" data-source="post: 5147009" data-attributes="member: 12324">The problem comes from a misnomer. Game balance is actually something different than Rules balance, where the former is the act of balancing the game as it is being played at an actual game table, versus the latter which balances the mechanical elements used in this game and written on paper.Some amount of Rules balance in a game is a commandable goal. It ensures that players have choices to play the characters they want, and yet do not get a mechanical upper hand that would rob other players from their own thunder. That's all fine and good. Game balance does not solely rely on Rules balance to happen, though. Good communication and cooperation between the participants in the game, whether DM and/or players, is paramount. There's a informal rule for this: "don't be a dick". Don't rob other players from their moments to shine, cooperate with them, don't try to be the best at everything all the time, don't try to break the rules on purpose... these kinds of things are part of the Social aspect of the game. No amount of rules in the world will ever be able to stop some selfish player to break the game or spoil it for the others involved if he just wants to. There's also the way the DM uses the rules and challenges specific characters. If a character is noticeably more powerful than some other character(s) in the group, it makes sense for enemies knowing the party's layout to want to take that powerful guy out first, to make him the target of powerful spells and ranged attacks, etc. It should not happen all the time of course, but it completely makes sense, as the characters rise in the world, for the world to react to their specific makeup, attitudes, powers, and so on, so forth. There's obviously more to it than this, but really, the bottom line simply is: Rules balance should not be substituted for Game balance. Some amount of fairness and relatively equal choices in the game's design is good, and beneficial to the game. Obsessing over the "fairness" of choices on the written page, and thus reducing, limiting these choices while exponentially increasing the game's codification and complexity to reach some theoretical "fairness" on said page, is not. It is all in the excluded middle, to me, here: some amount of Rules balance is fine; Mistaking Rules balance for Game balance isn't.</blockquote>

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