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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5337289" data-attributes="member: 21169">Not it's not, and that's a good point. I see roleplaying games as very much a team game. The problem there is that the characters, the useful, and less useful, jar. They don't work in the same game, imo. It would be fine if all the PCs were of low effectiveness as the GM can lower the level of the challenges.Some game systems allow for a much wider range of PC effectiveness than others. I've experienced some severe imbalance problems with the 'wide open' systems such as Champions and Mutants & Masterminds, to a lesser degree with 3e D&D.Many groups are fine with that, they don't want balanced PCs. I do, so I think with the 'wide open' systems there needs to be clear direction from the GM at char gen time as to the expected levels of effectiveness.Good question. I believe that each PC should contribute more or less equally to the success of the mission. The support role is often wrongly overlooked as contributing less than the damage dealer. If we accept that it is just as much of a contribution then I think one does have to place limits on it. It's possible for support and debuff powers to be too good. The player probably isn't selfish, he just wants to help. But he might be helping too much.I can give an example from a superhero game I played in, using Silver Age Sentinels d20. The BBEG in a oneoff was a Galactus type, with something like 7 attacks a round. One PC, in round 1, used a potent debuff power to reduce his attacks to 1 a round. That pretty much ended the fight right there. Too good, imo, way too good. One player's character shouldn't be winning the fight basically single-handed like that, imho. We later discovered we had the rule wrong, and the debuff power shouldn't have worked like that, but imo the GM should've nerfed it right there, perhaps ruling it reduced 'Galactus's' attacks to 6 with one application of the power, 5 with the second and so forth, which would've kept the challenge interesting.</blockquote>

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