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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6332053" data-attributes="member: 18">That's just not my experience - many games, including some versions of D&D, are happy to set the rocket launchers among the paintballs. It's not a result of DM dickery. I mean, good god, the entire game of RIFTS is built on "some of you are rocket launchers, some of you are paintball guns!" and it's never spelled out - though at least there it tends to be more obvious, with the problem being with the "middle ground" characters who look good but perform poorly.There's also the "you start with a knife, and the other guy only has a pointy stick and harsh language, but at level 12, you'll just have a really sharp knife, and he'll have a homing rocket launcher and a jetpack" model, of course.One thing that bugs me, I guess, is the sort of dishonesty - you so rarely see a game outside of the OSR field saying "You will be okay in fighting, and totally outclassed everywhere else!". I kind of respect a number of OSR games because they're a bit clearer on this.Honestly, that seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Some games make the cooperative endeavour a breeze. Others seem to go to great lengths to subvert or confuse expectations.3.XE/PF was particularly problematic for me in this regard, because to really understand what could go wrong with it, you not only had to be pretty into mechanics, you not only had to either experience it going wrong, or read up on it, you had to understand what had made things go wrong and why, and that could be a hard thing to do.My brother DMs PF and he still doesn't understand some of it's problems, because whilst he's very smart, he doesn't really grok that some of the things that are happening are because the system is causing them to happen, and that they're more or less inevitable.It's not a trivially noticed or dealt-with issue and comparing it to everyone agreeing that this poker night is for fun, or that we are watching horror movies and will not be drinking too much this movie night seems really cheap. Plus, if all you can do is say "Well, you can play a Fighter, but you're going to need to basically 'suck it up' a lot of the time, whereas the Wizard gets to have fun all the time", then I think it's fair to say that the GAME has serious issues, not you as a DM.(Here's to hoping that, post-PHB, that is going to be less of an issue, of course! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

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