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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmartkdr2" data-source="post: 8622137" data-attributes="member: 7017304">For me, the general answer to "what is balance in DnD?" the most important answer is "when each player has roughly equal opportunity to contribute to the team."A couple clarifications:"Roughly equal" means no one notices the imbalance. It's okay if one barbarian pc does more damage than another if the gap is small enough that players don't pick up on it. But "noticeable" is a subjective category: some players will track every point of damage dealt and add them up and notice that Abby did 4 more damage than Beth over the course of the dungeon and feel bad about it. (Obviously that's an outlier)"Opportunity to contribute" isn't the same as "contribution" - if Dave is a quiet player who always turns down the opportunity to engage with an npc and prefers to watch Fred rp because Fred is funny - Dave has not been slighted. Which brings up another point - any part of the game that gets played counts."Contribute to the team" does depend on my assumption that DnD is a team game. You can play it otherwise but I don't like that - and "contribution" is also deliberately vague. Combat effectiveness is really hard to pin down anyways in a game with many and varied control spells, but there are non-combat ways to contribute as well, which need to be considered. In my experience, 5e's rules do a pretty good job keeping the game balanced, at least in as much as rules are a factor. The only imbalances I've seen come from not engaging with the game the way the dm intended or dm favoritism, not bad subclasses or whatever (although I haven't seen all the subclasses in play.)Anyways, if no one's feeling overshadowed then the game is balanced enough, at least for that table.</blockquote>

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