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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1194103" data-attributes="member: 10201">No, i said dual-classing was rare.  Multi-classing was fairly common--probably about half the PCs (without pulling out the character sheets--i still have most of them--to double check).Zero.  I've never run into the phenomenon personally, and it took me a fair bit to parse that acronym when i started running into it online.  [And, i'll note that i managed to hang around on r.g.f.misc and r.g.f.advocacy for years before RPGnet or EnWorld came onlin, and nobody ever had need of that term in any context that i ever ran across.  I find it a curious phenomenon, and it seems to strangely only be a frequent-enough occurrence in D&D games to have coined a phrase.  Not saying that this is inherent to D&D of any flavor, or that it never happens in other games.]  Partly, i believed in fudging, and partly i had players who knew i wasn't going to save them, and thus sensibly retreated when things got rough.  A fair %age of battles ended in retreat, rather than victory for either side.  This partly gets back to the fairness issue: For me, a game where every encounter is tailored in difficulty for the group may be "fair", but it isn't fun.  I tailored encounters for the situation (make the guards of the temple as tough as the guards of that temple should be) and relied on the players to have some common sense (either find out ahead of time how powerful the guards are, or have a plan to retreat if you discover you're in over your head).None that i recall.  I remember saving individual characters through fudging or, more often, creative interpretation of ambiguous results.  But those were few and far between, and the few battles where they were in over their heads, i don't think i had to do that.  (And the party was typically 12-20+ PCs, so there was a fair bit of redundancy and a single PC death wouldn't, generally, cascade to everyone else.)Twice.  Neither was because of the rules, and in fact they were specifically due to me ignoring/breaking the rules.  Both were due to blatant GM favoritism (one of my brother's characters, and my girlfriend's character).Granting for the moment that my memory is sufficiently good on this point (something i can't really prove--and on which i could, of course, be wrong), there's probably another contributing factor.  Except for the two guys i got into gaming with, and one of my brother's friends who learned D&D somewhere else, i introduced pretty much every one of my players to RPGs, and was their first (and, in most cases, for the run of my game, only) GM.  Thus, their playstyles tended to be a reasonable mesh for mine and for each other because they didn't have any contrary examples of how to play.  And, for me, balance is irrelevant--spotlight time is what matters.  As long as everyone gets to contribute equally, it's all good, and you do *not* need balance to facillitate that.  You need niche protection.So, in other words, the classes are only properly balanced if you play in the style assumed?  The further you stray from that (such as by using tougher, rather than more-capable, opponents to challenge a group of disparate combat ability), the less balanced it becomes?</blockquote>

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