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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7015228" data-attributes="member: 4937">We should probably first pause and say that to some players, "Outshining the rest of the group" is the whole point of playing.  I call this group "ego gamers", but to be less demeaning lets just say that they have self-validation as their sole aesthetic goal of play.  To this group, balance in a game is terrible.  What they want is a game that lets them be a brokenly powerful character that can assume all narrative power in the game, asserting their will on the game.  The other players in the game are there only to witness their awesome might, and the DM in the group is there only to validate the awesomeness of their plans.  If the game were balanced, they wouldn't be able to use the system to achieve their desired goals.I'm sure its very thrilling for them, but it usually makes for dysfunctional cooperative games.  In a non-RPG, this player tends to want to play everyone's characters.  In an RPG, this player wants to be the sole player playing the character that rolls a d20, while all other characters roll a d6.  Very small amounts of imbalance can be fixed by focus fire or scenario manipulation or providing outlets for other skills to shine.  But there is a limit to this.  First, focus fire and scenario manipulation are inherently unfair, and the player with the imbalanced character may rightly be upset that he's being metagamed against simply because of his system mastery.  Second, focus fire and scenario manipulation themselves shift spotlight, and can end up being counterproductive as the game is increasingly (literally) more about that one character.  Providing outlets for other characters to shine can be good, but it doesn't tend to promote cooperative problem solving, can slow the pace of the story, and may end up producing a game that isn't the game everyone wanted to play.  And ultimately, if the system is really broken, none of that matters because the character can overcome any challenge anyway.Then you have RoShamBo balance.  This can work out fine if the opportunities for each player to shine are roughly equal.   You have a Fighter that excels against Brutes, but is weak against Swarms, a Wizard that excels against Swarms but is weak against Snipers, and a Rogue that excels against Snipers but is weak against Brutes.   This works well in simple games where you can control exactly what powers each role has, but gets increasingly hard to accomplish in an RPG as the number of character building options increase.  Still, it's one tool for creating balance in an RPG.  In my current game, one PC doesn't do a lot of damage, but he does it very reliably.  He tends to not shine against things with lots of hit points but poor defenses, while shining in the reverse case.  Another PC does very poorly against things that lack anatomy, but can quickly kill anything that is subject to critical hits.  Another does well against things that aren't resistant to magic, but can be very weak against things that are.  It's not a perfect Roshambo sort of situation, but each PC having strengths and weaknesses means that in any given encounter one PC might be the hero that the party is relying on the most.Still, probably the hardest part of balance in a cooperative game isn't merely making the character important, but making all the roles equally fun to play.  I was playing Zombiecide: Black Plague recently and while it was a pretty fun game, what I noticed is that while all six of the basic heroes have important roles to play in the team, they aren't equally fun to play.  For example, the character whose shtick is 'I can tank' mostly has a passive role to play in the party and most likely ends up receiving as loot passive enhancements like armor.  His job is to stand alongside the more active melee characters like the fighter and the paladin and take hits for them, or to go cover the ranged characters if they get overrun.  That's important, but its largely a passive support role and other than the pride you might feel at saving someone else, it's probably not as enjoyable as the Ranger's consistent damage, the Wizard's late game nuclear strike options and overall utility, the Rogue or the Paladin's mobility or even the Fighter's brute force.  The situation is not helped by the fact that the base game only has magic items that support the wizard and the ranger well.   For that matter, while the Wizard is phenomenal in the mid to late game, your initial weapon is extremely weak and until you get some equipment it's easy to feel really useless or even helpless in the early game - sort of like old school D&D and its flawed assumption that you can achieve balance by making a class weak early on but strong later.</blockquote>

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