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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5984949" data-attributes="member: 996">Even games like Hero and GURPS have some attempt at balance.  Point-buy, afterall, presumes that point costs are relative to power/usefulness.  Equal points should equal roughly equal ability.   In theory.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />In practice, systems like those have no 'class balance' issues, by definition.  Choosing a character concept in Hero (the one of the three I'm most familiar with, though I haven't even looked at the latest ed), for instance, does not relegate you to uselessness or virtually guarantee you dominance at some later date.  That, alone, puts it far ahead of any version of D&D.   Similarly, there's no "5 minute workday" in Hero, no 'heal bots' or 'meat shields,' and no worries about the GM giving out 'overpowered items.'   On the other hand, the role of 'system mastery' can be overwhelming.  3e 'builds' are rough, low-granularity things compared to Hero point-shaving.To get a semblance of balance Hero relies on a very simple mechanism: campaign limits.  Be they active points or rule of X, they put everyone on about the same scale of effectiveness.  Efficient builds can do /more/ (sometimes vastly more), but even fairly pedestrian ones can usually hit the campaign limits with no problem, and thus be viable.Is Hero 'balanced?'  Well, it comes back to definitions.  You can build a viable character to any concept you can imagine in any genre.  That's a tremendous amount of meaningful choice.  OTOH, the universe of possible trap choices is positively infinite.  By my definitions of balance, it's balanced, but only at a reasonable level of system mastery.  Ironically, the opposite of modern D&D, which tends to crumble in the face of system mastery.</blockquote>

Verification