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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8623171" data-attributes="member: 7025508">When designing a game, the designers of course should pay attention to balance. There should be not trap options, if you have choice between different things, they should be roughly equally good. However, this doesn't mean they should be the same! Often attempts at balancing things leads to homogenisation, where the choices become just cosmetic and everyone basically does the same thing with slightly different fluff. This is to be avoided, different choices should actually be different!And this also means it is OK for some characters to be worse at combat, as long as they're good in something else useful. Sure, D&D is rather combat heavy game, so all characters should be able to contribute in some way in that, but I feel the obsession about perfectly balancing the combat power is misguided. It elevates combat above all other aspects of the game, and it simply is bizarre from from world building perspective. Certainly a fighter, whose whole raison d'être is to be a master of battle should be better at it than say, an illusionist, a thief or an artificer?Also, in actual practice, at the party level, balance doesn't matter that much. Spotlight does. But if one character does a bit more damage or can cast a couple of spells more, it doesn't really matter, as long as one character doesn't make another redundant. I have played a lot of (non D&D mostly) games where the characters were of wildly different power levels. Exalted games with Dragon Blooded (least powerful) and Solars (most powerful) or WoD games with normal humans with master level mages or vampires. Worked just one as long as each character had things to do and contribute. Depending of the player those don't necessarily need to even be "useful" things, they can be purely dramatic things. So yeah, designers probably need to obsess about the balance,* players, not so much. And GM's just need to pay attention that everyone gets a chance to contribute and don't feel redundant or neglected.* Now of course it is perfectly fine to design a game where all characters are not of equal power such as Ars Magica or Exalted, but then that power difference should be stated outright, so the plyers can make informed choices.</blockquote>

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