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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deadguy" data-source="post: 591673" data-attributes="member: 2480">I would suggest that you've effectively asnwered the question of whether balance is important to you in RPGs, Maerdwyn. For you, balance equates to chances to shine, to be in the limelight, as it were. And, yes, that's very much the way that Ars Magica is balanced. So long as everyone gets to be the magus sometimes, we accept playing the grogs.Of course, it's more complicated than that, since individual stories may not even involved magi, and so we are concerned with the balance between grogs and companions, companions and companions, and between grogs and other grogs.Ars Magica is a challenging game to run, since it does allow a wide variation between characters, even members of the same tier (being a 25-year old magus around a couple of centenarians is interesting!). The balance here has a lot less to do with the balance of the rules (even though there is a strong point-buy quality to the rules), and instead depends upon the Storyteller structuring the sequence of adventures and events to call upon the skills of all the characters (and by extension, or perhaps primarily, all the players).Perhaps this emphasises that 'balance' means different things to different groups and different games. The 'spotlight time' balance tends to be pre-eminent as a measure, but different games try different ways to achieve this. D&D3e tries to make the DM's work lighter by using the game mechanics to balance the play, but it's not the only approach, as Ars Magica demonstrates.</blockquote>

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