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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6176609" data-attributes="member: 17106">I guess now I'm biased towards seeing that rationale as BS. If there was a good in-game justification for why a new character class should be better at magic than the existing wizard or better at fighting then the existing fighter, than the mechanics should reflect that. For example, the whole FR Spellfire business. This isn't such a case.Well, this wouldn't be complete without an appeal to tradition would it? Any version of the bard in D&D probably meets most of that description, and functions as the jack of all trades, master of none that we know the bard to be. Which is a decent character but rarely the best one.Why? Relative equal viability is simply a postulate in this whole argument. I see no reason why all character types need to meet that standard, and I don't see that anything is lost if they don't, other than some nebulous and arbitrary construct of "balance". If I'm sitting down and making a bard (or anything), making him of "relative equal viability" to some other disparate concept isn't really a consideration. The character the best it can be; such comparisons are marginally relevant at best.Most players are perfectly capable of enjoying characters that are not relatively equal, and most stories rely on characters that are not, and all versions of D&D have characters that are not. I never understood where this mystical standard arose from.</blockquote>