Paul Farquhar
Legend
I agree, my players often spend as long planning as the do acting. And during the planning stage character power is irrelevant. It's all on the players.In games I play I don't care who executes the details of the plan, making the plan is the important bit. I can't count how many times that Jo says "Hey Bob if you could cast X or do ritual Y..."
Then again I don't care about "balance", different members of the team contribute in different ways.
I wouldn't say balance "never" matters. If you are in a situation where everyone is playing X and no one is playing Y, then the imbalance between X and Y is a problem. I see a bit of this with the Twighlight Cleric. But if you look at fighters and wizards, the statistics constantly show more people playing fighters than wizards, even though the white room says wizards are far more powerful. The classes are imbalanced, but that imbalance is not a problem. The game works just fine, and if you made fighters stronger and wizards weaker then people might stop playing wizards altogether.