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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9093139" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The faults of &quot;spotlight balance&quot; (for cooperative games, I should say.)A board game where one person does everything for multiple turns, and then a different person does everything for multiple turns, etc., and everyone who isn't the Spotlight Player is more or less just sitting there is going to be an extremely unpopular board game. &quot;Bored&quot; game, one might say. Not getting to meaningfully participate or contribute to the group effort for multiple turns in a row kills interest stone dead, and if any one spotlight shines a bit too bright or too wide, it can easily crowd out the others.As a high-minded, abstract principle, &quot;spotlight balance&quot; sounds wonderful. All the freedom of an &quot;unbalanced&quot; game, or near enough to it, since within each spotlight the player is effectively alone. Yet all the rigor and challenge of a balanced game, since the ideal is that each player's spotlight is about equal in size, brightness, and duration. In practice, however, literally no part of that ever ends up ideal, and the specific characteristics of D&amp;D lead to serious stumbles, mostly because of magic. Magic, the way D&amp;D has (almost always) done it, is simply too powerful, versatile, and inaccessible to be compatible with &quot;spotlight balance.&quot; Other games have taken steps to fix this, e.g. the Spheres of Power/Might alternate magic system for Pathfinder 1e (and later D&amp;D 5e), but none of these alternatives has ever truly challenged the hegemony of D&amp;D's overpowered, ultra-versatile, class-locked magic.I get why people are enamored with the idea of &quot;spotlight balance.&quot; It just...doesn't actually work in practice, and we all know the difference between theory and practice: in theory there should be no difference, in practice there is.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9093139, member: 6790260"] The faults of "spotlight balance" (for cooperative games, I should say.) A board game where one person does everything for multiple turns, and then a different person does everything for multiple turns, etc., and everyone who isn't the Spotlight Player is more or less just [I]sitting there[/I] is going to be an extremely unpopular board game. "Bored" game, one might say. Not getting to meaningfully participate or contribute to the group effort for multiple turns in a row kills interest stone dead, and if any one spotlight shines a bit too bright or too wide, it can easily crowd out the others. As a high-minded, abstract principle, "spotlight balance" sounds [I]wonderful[/I]. All the freedom of an "unbalanced" game, or near enough to it, since within each spotlight the player is effectively [I]alone[/I]. Yet all the rigor and challenge of a balanced game, since the [I]ideal[/I] is that each player's spotlight is [I]about[/I] equal in size, brightness, and duration. In practice, however, literally no part of that ever ends up ideal, and the specific characteristics of D&D lead to serious stumbles, mostly because of [I]magic[/I]. Magic, the way D&D has (almost always) done it, is simply too powerful, versatile, and inaccessible to be compatible with "spotlight balance." Other games have taken steps to fix this, e.g. the Spheres of Power/Might alternate magic system for Pathfinder 1e (and later D&D 5e), but none of these alternatives has ever truly challenged the hegemony of D&D's overpowered, ultra-versatile, class-locked magic. I get why people are enamored with the idea of "spotlight balance." It just...doesn't actually work in practice, and we all know the difference between theory and practice: in theory there should be no difference, in practice there is. [/QUOTE]

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