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What is balance to you, and why do you care (or don't)?
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<blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8624437" data-attributes="member: 7030042"><p>To my mind, a game is balanced when any two characters made and played by players with roughly the same level of overall skill will contribute about equally to the table's gameplay experience in any given pillar/aspect of gameplay that both players are similarly interested in engaging with over the course of a reasonably long period of time - you need the latter to average out the effects of chance and of circumstance.</p><p></p><p>If, say, you have a druid and a fighter, if both players are interested in combat to the same extent, both classes should allow them to contribute at about the same level of effectiveness over the course of several sessions; that should likewise be the case if both players are interested to the same extent in out-of-combat exploration or social interaction. They don't have to contribute in identical fashion, of course - if anything, you want the fighter to contribute in ways that are both generic and "fighter-y" and the druid to contribute in ways that are both generic and "druid-y", but if there's a real discrepancy in how the two characters end up contributing to the game over some span of multiple sessions, it ought IMO to come down to a difference in player skill or in player interest/engagement, rather than the classes' design.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Composer99, post: 8624437, member: 7030042"] To my mind, a game is balanced when any two characters made and played by players with roughly the same level of overall skill will contribute about equally to the table's gameplay experience in any given pillar/aspect of gameplay that both players are similarly interested in engaging with over the course of a reasonably long period of time - you need the latter to average out the effects of chance and of circumstance. If, say, you have a druid and a fighter, if both players are interested in combat to the same extent, both classes should allow them to contribute at about the same level of effectiveness over the course of several sessions; that should likewise be the case if both players are interested to the same extent in out-of-combat exploration or social interaction. They don't have to contribute in identical fashion, of course - if anything, you want the fighter to contribute in ways that are both generic and "fighter-y" and the druid to contribute in ways that are both generic and "druid-y", but if there's a real discrepancy in how the two characters end up contributing to the game over some span of multiple sessions, it ought IMO to come down to a difference in player skill or in player interest/engagement, rather than the classes' design. [/QUOTE]
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