Wait, what? Cooperation in a party stems from characters being specialists in their own field, working together to achieve a common goal. If everyone can everything, nobody needs to rely on anyone else to achieve that goal and cooperation is not necessary . Thus, niche abilities lead to it being a cooperative game experience .
Thats the issue with balance when you try to give everyone a niche.
A better way is to make the challenges greater than what one person can do alone, regardless of what they do.
This is something Ive learned given my game is about as extreme a power fantasy as it gets short of DC style superheroes. Casual dragon suplexing and soloing entire armies and things like that.
Balance can't come from niches, because niches run counter to the power fantasy.
Balance has to come from the challenges simply being beyond what these highly capable characters can do by themselves.
For me, my game has trended towards higher lethality coupled with a survival emphasis, which are then pitted against challenge design that requires cooperation to overcome, and then evolves as those challenges become soloable.
Facing a dragon is something you eventually come to accomplish as a party by around level 5ish in my game. 5 levels later most could probably solo one, and 5 more levels and you'd have to be really unlucky to get wrecked by one.
But by this point, now those same dragons are effectively the cannon fodder you slay because they're distractions, and not the real threat.
When you eventually grow strong enough to duel an army, its a palpable leap in capability, but very quickly armies are the least of your concerns.
Now does this mean DND should go in that direction? No, it has to solve for its own scope. That can involve more emphasis on lethality and even survival, but I think the primary way DND has to solve it is through monster, weapon, and spell design.
Making each of these areas better, more indepth, and most importantly, integrated with each other will result in an overall game that doesn't need to waste energy trying to foster niches.
Instead, players have a wide variety of tools available to them and its on them to combine their collective abilities in ways that allow them to overcome the monsters.
Consider as another example Breath of the Wild. Link has a lot of tools he can use to succeed in his adventure, and
none of them are strictly necessary.
I personally don't even use Shields, and the game doesn't strictly punish me for not using them. I have other means of succeeding in the same challenges.
Equipment breaking is a big stickler for people in BOTW, but one doesn't strictly need to constantly use their equipment.
The chemistry system in tandem with runes allows for a wide variety of ways to succeed that are more equipment efficient. You can wipe an entire Bokoblin camp just by picking up boxes with Magnesis and letting gravity do the work. You can even make many mini-boss fights easy by just waiting for a storm to take advantage of not just your own lightning attacks, but natural lightning strikes. If you can bait them into a puddle or a lake, you don't even need the storm.
These non-hierachical means of success all provide for genuine freedom and release players from the need to worry about whether or not they've written the right formula to be allowed to play and then the right formula to be allowed to succeed.
Instead, they just play, and they find the formula to success by playing.
In a lot of ways, its the same underlying reason why I found removing to-hit mechanics to be the best solution to speeding up combat, because it removes the extraneous overhead that just gets in the way of the actual gameplay rather than adding to it.
Median height in the US for men is a hair over 5'9", and there have only been 25 players in the entire 75+ year history of the NBA who have been 5'9" or shorter.
