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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5969339" data-attributes="member: 32536">I'd argue that all of your analysis indicates that we should continue protesting C. 3E Wizards really do mess up the possibility of letting everyone shine in a game where players work together as a team of equals. Some things just can't be balanced, and the 3E Wizard is a square peg that won't fit into the round hole of a teamwork-focused game.Justice League or Avenger type team-ups of characters with wildly different skillsets and power levels only work with extremely fine-crafted situations that play to specific characters' abilities and weaknesses. It only works in movies and comic books because there is an author who has total control over the scenario and is capable of writing things so that each character has a chance to be in the spotlight. It only works because of the artificial and thoroughly engineered nature of those stories. That kind of thing isn't very easy to do in a tabletop RPG. Unless D&D was heavily rewritten with concepts and premises that'd make 4E look like a retroclone, I don't think it would work out. At the very least, it would be the exact same thing as high-level 3E: a game that won't work unless either the players specifically agree to not use certain classes or the DM takes on an extremely tough burden of micromanaging campaign balance and encounter design. I'd rather avoid that, myself.Having a balanced game would work a lot better than trying to make a deliberately (or accidentally) imbalanced game work within the contexts of A and B.Still, you do make the perfectly good point that appealing to both people who want a mythic hero and people who want to be a more mundane warrior is a laudable goal. The tough part is finding a way to balance a warrior who can punt a demon so hard it smashes through enemies and terrain features like a cannon ball with a warrior who, well... can't.One of the best ways to do this that I've ever seen put forward is to simply let the more mundane character break the game in a way no other character can. That is, balancing the classes around the idea of player balance, rather than character balance, and letting the player of the mundane fighter control multiple characters at once, whereas the players of more powerful characters like the mythic fighter or wizard still each can only control a single character. To use a LotR example, this would be something like letting one player control Gimli and letting another player control Sam, Merry, and Pippin.You'd have to balance things out so that letting one character have triple the actions wouldn't be overpowered, but it certainly lets more mundane characters still contribute greatly to a team dominated by more powerful ones. In fact, fans of simple fighters would probably work well with such a concept, since each of the sub-characters under the player's control would by necessity have to be simple in order to keep the game moving quickly.</blockquote>

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