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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8055031" data-attributes="member: 18">That's my point, that's a vastly narrower definition than "caring about PC balance", and even narrower than caring about intra-PC balance.And even exactly what you describe, I have seen happen, though only with teenagers - i.e. designing a character specifically to be better at something than another PC. That's rare because it's immature. I can think of specific examples from Rifts and CP2020 (and even SW D6 actually). And let's not even get started on Amber.But what's common, and perhaps outside your narrow definition is people caring that their PC seems generally ineffective compared to the other PCs. That's the thing. For example, the Rogue, objectively, in 2E, was pretty effective, in a pure "PvW" sense. But compared to the other PCs? Hah. No. He could put in gigantic effort to achieve something other PCs could achieve with a few spells or just by hacking through bodies.This is just about where you set the bar though. Ruin is an extremely high bar (npi). Degrade or lessen is a much lower bar. I've only ever seen AD&D/D&D get "ruined" by bad balance in 3.XE, where we had a situation where with a couple of unoptimized badly-multiclassed PCs were in a group with a couple of well-oiled powergamers and a borderline munchkin. I wasn't DMing (I was one of the powergamers). That was just profoundly unfun for basically everyone except the munchkin (and even he wasn't having that great of a time). When some people's PCs are just failing at everything, it gets noticeable, and 3E was pretty bad for that.4E and 5E though it's never done more than mildly degrade an experience. I've seen people clearly having less fun because their PCs just aren't effective, but outright not having fun at all? No. Still I think trying to go through an entire campaign with a suboptimal PC might really drain some people (not everyone, some people are just immune to it).Actually I also saw it in very early 2E, before we started basically just letting everyone roll until they had half-decent stats. Plenty of PCs in the early days were just jokes compared to other PCs and it clearly wasn't at all fun in some cases (esp. as 2E PCs didn't usually die like flies).</blockquote>

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