NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kahuna Burger" data-source="post: 487202" data-attributes="member: 8439">Re: Re: ReThank you for pointing this out. One of the last groups I played in had horrible party ballance, and actively enforced it in various ways. It was (unsuprisingly) the player of the single most powerful and important to every plot character who would throw out LOTR and claim that it was "good for the story".In my not terribly humble opinion <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> the only ways that a variety of power levels can be good is if you are either a bunch of sychophants stroking a couple guys egos, or you have a good enough DM to ballance multiple levels of power to make the characters equally significant and worth playing in the long haul. Having a character who was weak in combat terms but very important in the political or social parts of the gameworld could work, but only if those types of interactions were ballanced. It would also involve a lot of house rules to work in D&D obviously, because the ability to be good at anything scales with combat ability, due to the class level system. (Yeah, you could have a diplomat bard who wasn't much good in a fight. But you can have a rogue who is just as good a diplomat but IS good in a fight too. because of the caps on skill points per level, amoung other issues, you can't gain non combat advantage by giving up the physical abilities the way you do in a points based system.)One of the reasons that I enjoy roleplaying is that it is generally a cooperative rather than competitive game. If you don't ballance your campaign, you are likely to create resentment amoung the players. The point of the game is for everyone to enjoy themselves, after all. Ballance is crucial to that.LOTR, while a benchmark for fantasy, is really awful to use as a roleplaying guide. Unless you are playing games with very few players, most books are, because there are few good ensemble plots out there. (Notably, the only ones I can think of are based on roleplaying games...) Of course, if the "plot" requires someone to be significantly more powerful or weaker, its the job of the DM to include those elements, unless one player volunteers to take a less powerful role. In LOTRs the PCs are probably the non-hobbits except gandalf. And its still not very good because there are too many NPCs who are too crucial to the plot. Good roleplaying may be like interactive storytelling, but not all good stories are like roleplaying...Kahuna Burger</blockquote>

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