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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5321880" data-attributes="member: 3424">You know, I think this post made another piece of the balance puzzle click into place, at least for me. D&D evolved from wargames. And one of the characteristics of wargames is that one player usually controls multiple units. Each of those units would have individual capabilities, relative strengths and relative weaknesses, and it is up to the player to deploy his units so that they build on each others' strengths and shore up each others' weaknesses. Issues such as the need for certain units to be to protected by other units, or units held in reserve and not used until they are needed would thus be internalized within a single player. An artillery unit might have long-range attack capabilities, for example, but be vulnerable to close-range attacks. A player might thus decide to deploy an infantry unit close to the artillery unit to defend it against such attacks. Other units might be capable of making a single, devastating attack once per engagement, and a player who chooses to deploy such units should be prepared to leave them unused until needed, and ensure that they are protected until then. Similarly, when creating a party of characters for a single-player computer or console RPG, you don't really care that your fighter needs to protect your wizard, that your thief doesn't contribute much in a fight, or that your cleric spends all his actions healing the other characters. As a player, you are controlling the entire party. You only care that the party as a whole has the abilities required to overcome the challenges that you encounter in the game ("balanced", from one perspective <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). However, if one player only controls one character, then such issues can no longer be internalized, and imbalances between characters become more stark. I think the expectation in earlier editions was for players to be more accepting of these differences and to take turns to be in and out of the spotlight. On the other hand, the 4E approach is to make all characters more generally useful so that they can contribute in all situations (although not necessarily equally, or in the same way).</blockquote>

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