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="Aenghus" data-source="post: 5985154" data-attributes="member: 2656">To me the main advantage of better balance is that IMO it helps average referees run a better game. Refereeing involves keeping a lot of balls in the air, it's hard to do for average referees, who I think are probably in the majority, and anything that adds unnecesssarily to the workload is a pain. Bad balance adds more work for the referee both in prep time - <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">scrutinising rules for balance</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">finding where the flavour text and mechanics don't support each other (something I hate, hate hate), </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">banning or houseruling broken material</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">advising players at character creation - it's never fun telling people that their character concept is going to suck in a particular game system</li> </ul>and at run time -  <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">balancing spotlight time between PCs with what can be wildly different power levels (a few people prefer to avoid the spotlight, but most like it some of the time)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">watching out for games material that unexpectedly turns out to be broken,</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">encounters and situations that are unexpectedly far too dangerous or completely short-circuited and need to be adjusted on the fly</li> </ul>I prefer running games as close to as written as possible as this helps players know what to expect from the game - the more houserules the further away from "core" the game drifts, and the harder it is to create accurate expectations for the game. 4e was sufficiently well balanced for my purposes to eliminate the vast majority of the makework listed above, reducing my prep time and allowing me to use it for fun stuff like creating NPCs and plots.</blockquote>

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