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<blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4654529" data-attributes="member: 32536">I don't think balance is ever a bad thing. Some of you are saying that it &quot;gets in the way of flavor&quot;, but I don't see what you mean. You need to get a lot more specific in order to explain that one. Certainly, just because a game system is balanced doesn't mean that balance is forced upon your game, since it is always trivial to unbalance something that is already balanced.I do, however, think that balance is essential to a game. D&amp;D is not just a collective storytelling tool, it is a multiplayer game designed to serve the needs of a wide variety of people, and all such games inherently need to be balanced, for a lot of good reasons. What is more, it is very hard to balance something that starts imbalanced, so it is always best if balance is the goal of the original game designers, rather than something that players and DMs have to add.Actually, I will go as far to say that game imbalance is something that interferes with flavor and story far more than game balance does, since it forces the game designers preconceptions upon the DM and players far more. If a game is designed so that elves are inherently better than humans, then running a story in which elves are not superior becomes much more difficult. Meanwhile, if the two races were mechanically balanced from the start, it is fairly easy to give elves some advantage that makes them better for a single story, without interfering in everyone else's preferred way to play the game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TwinBahamut, post: 4654529, member: 32536"] I don't think balance is ever a bad thing. Some of you are saying that it "gets in the way of flavor", but I don't see what you mean. You need to get a lot more specific in order to explain that one. Certainly, just because a game system is balanced doesn't mean that balance is forced upon your game, since it is always trivial to unbalance something that is already balanced. I do, however, think that balance is essential to a [i]game[/i]. D&D is not just a collective storytelling tool, it is a multiplayer game designed to serve the needs of a wide variety of people, and all such games inherently need to be balanced, for a lot of good reasons. What is more, it is very hard to balance something that starts imbalanced, so it is always best if balance is the goal of the original game designers, rather than something that players and DMs have to add. Actually, I will go as far to say that game imbalance is something that interferes with flavor and story far more than game balance does, since it forces the game designers preconceptions upon the DM and players far more. If a game is designed so that elves are inherently better than humans, then running a story in which elves are [i]not[/i] superior becomes much more difficult. Meanwhile, if the two races were mechanically balanced from the start, it is fairly easy to give elves some advantage that makes them better for a single story, without interfering in everyone else's preferred way to play the game. [/QUOTE]

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