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="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5819701" data-attributes="member: 2067">This plays into the "minor challenges" aspect of the game. It's fine for someone to sit out a combat (or an exploration, or a social interaction) if it only takes 2 or 3 die rolls before it's over. It's not so fine if it takes a frickin' hour like 4e combat does.In zooming out to make the game more about the entire adventure rather than about the each individual challenge, it's fine to have some parts of the adventure that don't feature everyone, as long as the challenges don't take up huge chunks of time.Sometimes you do want a pretty epic encounter featuring the whole party, though, and for those, it's important to have that minimum competency level. When the big fight against the big dragon comes at the end of the dungeon, even the theif can meaningfully contribute -- even if they can't contribute AS MUCH as the fighter can. I'd also want the thief to be REQUIRED to contribute: as much as the fighter is the combat master, and will be achieving most of the successes here, he can't do it himself. He needs his friends who aren't so good at combat to come help out. Similarly, the bard might need her friends who aren't so good at social skills to come help out in the big peace treaty signing. And the theif might need her friends who aren't the best at traversing dangerous territory to blaze a trail anyway. Big encounters should use all the members of the party, and all the members of the party should have some basic method of contribution (there is no Always Fail, and no one character will ever Always Succeed). This directly hews to the amount of time the activity takes up at the table. I don't want to spend an hour -- or even really a HALF hour! -- in combat. Most of the time, I want to spend about five, and in a big climax, fifteen minutes is still probably fine. In a game where you don't take up huge chunks of time doing one single activity, you have a lot of flexibility to make some characters not so great at a given activity, without making them feel entirely boned as players (which is why it's important for DMs to communicate when they're going to focus almost entirely on one thing or another: so that players can pick characters that won't be poor picks for that focus).</blockquote>

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