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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JustinA" data-source="post: 3503508" data-attributes="member: 51618">Nobody.The secret of balance lies in two questions:1. How powerful are you compared to the characters played by the other players?2. How powerful are you compared to the challenges your character is facing?The first question is important because people playing in an RPG generally don't want to become audience members. This makes perfect sense: The entire gameplay of an RPG is based on taking meaningful action. If you can never take meaningful action because Joe the Powergamer's character Uber-Cool solves every problem and single-handedly overcomes every obstacle, then you're not truly getting to play the game. It's like playing paired Monopoly where your partner rolls all the dice and makes all the real estate decisions.The second question is important because an important part of any game lies in the concept of challenge. Sometimes that challenge lies in overcoming the rules of the game; sometimes that challenge lies in overcoming the skills of the other players; and sometimes its both. But the overcoming of a challenge is always at the heart of the gaming experience. (And I'm not just talking about RPGs here.)Now, here's an important thing to understand: For the powergamer, an important part of the challenge lies in the skillful creation of the character. To create a character who can easily overcome obstacles which other characters built with a similar pool of resources could not easily overcome is, in fact, overcoming a very specific type of challenge for the powergamer. In such a confrontation, the powergamer is testing his solution to see if it is sound.That being said: Even the powergamer wants his character to be challenged, because it is in the challenge that he discovers how successful he has been. It is only the munchkin who wants to play a solitaire game of Monopoly without any risk of ever having to pay rent to another landlord.Here's the other secret of balance: "Power" does not always mean combat prowess. In fact, it almost never means combat prowess. And it certainly doesn't mean "who would win if you put them in a deathmatch with each other".The concept of "power" can actually be better understood as "spotlight time". It's okay if Character A excels at X, as long as Character B has a chance to excel at Y and Character C has a chance to excel at Z.Now, in the case of a traditional D&D campaign, the ability to contribute meaningfully to combat situations becomes important -- because in the traditional dungeon crawl, combat features heavily in not only the number of challenges it constitutes but the amount of time spent resolving it. But even with that being said, we know that it's okay for the rogue not to be the best at dealing out damage during combat because they'll be able to get their spotlight time in searching and scouting and disabling traps.So if balance is only a matter of calibrating between different players and then calibrating between the group and the challenges it faces, what is this concept of "game balance" that designers spend so much time looking for?Well, as with many rules of the game, the designers are trying to do the heavy-lifting for you. They're trying to make it so that different players are all capable of contributing to the game, even if one of them is pushing for every drop of power they can squeeze from the system while another is simply content to follow the whims of their vision. And they're trying to make it so that they can provide you with some meaningful insight into what types of challenges are appropriate for what types of characters.</blockquote>

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