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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9483294" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Unfortunately, nothing I have ever seen suggests that "spotlight balance" is actually effective in any meaningful sense. It's a lovely idea, that doesn't actually work in the D&D space, because one of the classes has as its thing "bend the rules of the world to do what I want done."You cannot have meaningful "spotlight balance" when one group of characters gets to decide how concentrated the spotlights are, and the other group is dependent on them.Statistical testing has shown that a player success rate of about 60%-65% is seen as "normal", so it is quite easy to actually design a game that fits human psychology. But that's not the primary area that balance matters in. The primary area that balance matters in is whether players feel their contributions to play are of reasonably comparable impact to other players. There's a reason "Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit" comes up in balance discussions all the time. BMX Bandit rightly feels pointless in his "crime-fighting duo" because Angel Summoner's angels literally do everything, including letting BMX Bandit actually participate.Whereas I emphatically think low-level play makes things dramatically worse, because players can't learn from their mistakes, because the harshness of the consequences ensures that their investment is thrown away repeatedly, and because the swinginess of the dice means that their preparations and choices barely matter--luck will define everything, period. That's not a way to produce players who want to participate. It depends on having players who already are gung-ho and willing to forgive quite a lot to get to the good stuff.Sure, it would be nice if that happened more often. Unfortunately, the very same folks who advocate for the "HP are low, dice are swingy" etc. are also, nine times out of ten, the people who advocate for utterly merciless opponents, and for shows of mercy to bite the PCs in the butt (e.g. you let the goblin scouts go...so they immediately run back to camp to warn everyone else and thus the challenge increases tenfold), and for no good deed to go unpunished while evil ones reap rich rewards, and for authority figures that are obstructionist and obtuse in the extreme and generally just an obstacle to overcome. And then such folks complain that their PCs are always murderhobos who take no prisoners, backstab every ally, steal everything that isn't welded down, and go on murder-sprees whenever any authority figure opposes them.There is no inherent link between the two, I admit, but I've seen this pattern crop up way, way, way too many times. DMs reap what they sow, and they teach their players through their DMing. Far too many DMs don't seem to understand this.Would you believe me if I told you that this is far more representative of the oh-so-maligned 4e than 5e? I've seen at least three almost entirely separate TPKs in 5e--at the allegedly better low levels you describe. Meanwhile, I've not only had my own character die in a 4e game (thankfully, he got better through the party's efforts), I've also seen three deaths and two very near misses, all of that in one campaign that sadly didn't get past level 5. (The DM had to stop due to a family crisis that would require basically full-time attention for the indefinite future.)</blockquote>

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