NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9135015" data-attributes="member: 996">You don't have to be 'on par' to be meaningfully contributing in a given pillar, because there's a lot of things to do in a given pillar.  Combat is the one D&D has most thoroughly developed.  In combat, the fighter "tanks" in the front line, the Barbarian rages and swings for the bleachers, the Bard buffs them with a song, maybe heals them if they're hurt, and the Rogue sneaks around and backstabs the enemies engaged with the fighter.They're all functional in combat.  The game has varied with how well each class those their respective thing, but that's been something it's leaned towards from the beginning, when it was just the Fighter (tanky tanky), Cleric (heal & turn), and Magic-user (solve any problem with a spell, iff he knows the right spell and has it memorized and hasn't cast it yet and can spend 6 to 54 seconds of the 1 minute round stand upright, babbling/waving his hands/playing with batshit/whatever without taking a single point of damage from any source).Out of combat, the Fighter takes a nap (to get back his Action Surge, I guess), the Barbarian gives some tribal wisdom if you're in the right area of wilderness, otherwise he goes drinking or something, the Rogue has some contacts if you're dealing with the shady underworld or just steals stuff if you're not, and the Bard goes full Diplomancer...That's not a definition of balance, it's just a specific example of a rule.  It might be an example of fairness, in that everyone gets the same number of choices. If you sufficiently constrained adventure design that each pillar got "equal time" in some (maybe not literal) sense, fine, you could impose balance on that example.  You're doing so at the expense of the players (especially the GM in a typical TTRPG) opportunities to play the game/"tell the story" they want.</blockquote>

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