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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3789608" data-attributes="member: 5143">Unfortunately, options create imbalance by their very nature.  I've noticed this heavily in 3rd edition due to my group of powergaming players.  The more options I give them, the more powerful they get.  And the ones that can powergame better than the others become significantly MORE powerful due to synergies in the rules, making everyone feel they need to powergame to stay effective.If you approach each class in terms of class first, role second then you have an inherent imbalance in the classes.  After all, if I said "What powers should a wizard be able to get?" and I got an answer from as many people as I could, I would likely get answers like "Individual damage, area of effect damage, charming, walls, illusions, protection for himself and allies, buffing for himself and allies, flying, teleporting, shape changing, summoning, animating the dead, creating items out of nothing, battlefield control, making enemies weaker, etc"If I asked the same question about fighters, it's likely I'd get the answer "They should be good with weapons and armor.  And they should be athletic and tough."However, that's the thinking that created the imbalance in the first place.  There's simply no way to make "good with weapons and armor" as powerful as all of the above wizard abilities.Instead, the only way to fix it is to think in terms of balance first and class second.  If you instead think of it in terms of "What types of things do people want to do in a group?  What things are fun to play?"  You tend to naturally come up with a list very similar to Defender, Striker, Controller, Leader.  So, then you ask yourself...who should be the best at being a Defender?  Well, it should classes like the Fighter and Paladin.You can come at this list a different way, but it comes to the same thing.  Instead, if you asked "What makes a fighter fun to play?  Why do people play them?"  The answer is (on average) that the player likes being the kind of character who stands toe to toe with the enemy and protects their allies from damage they wouldn't be able to survive.  When isn't it fun?  When the rest of the classes don't need your protection or can survive better than you can.It all comes down to the same thing.  The ONLY way to create a TRUE balance between Wizards (or Clerics) and Fighters is to reduce the power of wizards a lot and increase the power of fighters a lot.So you define wizards as "the arcane casters who use magic to be a controller".  Then you give them spells and special abilities that let them accomplish their goal.  They can be as good as you want at it because they aren't competing against any other class for that role except other controllers.Then you define fighters as "the class that uses their martial prowess tp protect their allies".  So you likewise give them abiltiies that accomplishes their goal.  Instead of "being good at weapons and armor" you redefine it as "extremely good to the point of being at or surpassing the human maximum in physical abilities".  So they get to jump 10 feet as an immediate action to come between a weapon and one of their allies, the ability to shield both themselves AND an adjacent ally at the same time with their shield, the ability to trip enemies and do damage at the same time.  This makes the class more versatile than they were before, more interesting than they were before and more in line with the wizard.What happens if you give the wizard the ability to, say, cast a mage armor on his allies in this system?  Well, either the ability stacks with the fighter's ability to protect someone or it doesn't.  If it doesn't stack, then why would the fighter stand next to someone to protect them when the wizard can do it better?  If it DOES stack, then you start creating not only a stacking problem (when you can add +4 from a mage armor and +5 due to a plus 3 heavy shield, then you increase an ac so much that there's no way to counter it without just as many bonuses stacking...then you are adding to the Christmas Tree effect) but a problem with conflicting roles.  If the wizard is spending his time buffing people's AC and so is the fighter, who is the one doing the damage to the enemy?  Who is it that actually needs the protection, since the wizard can defend himself with his powers?  If 4 points of AC from the Mage Armor is good enough, then the fighter doesn't really need to USE his defensive powers and should have made up an offensive fighter.  Only, the wizard is better at that as well.</blockquote>

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