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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6237851" data-attributes="member: 17106">I think you're right. A player is typically not comparing his character to the others, he's typically comparing it to an ideal in his head. Nor are most players keeping score in terms of how effective their characters are or how much time they get in the spotlight.And, of course, the actual balance between two player characters in an actual campaign is determined by so many factors other than the rules on the page that were used to create that character, that trying to micromanage those rules is pointless.The two most important things to a player are customization (being able to make the character you want and do the things during gameplay that you want) and naturalism (feeling that there is an internal logic to the game and that abilities match genre-appropriate expectations of "realism"). Probably the third is accessibility (the amount of time and effort needed to understand the rules). And then even when you start talking about balance, the balance between the players and the things they're actually competing against or the tasks they're trying to accomplish is more practically important than any parity in the choices one player has to make.It's an odd phenomenon, that which you discuss. There were always charop forums and theoretical discussions, they were always fun exercises, and they never reliably correlated with actual play. The charop forums on WotC catered to a group of nerds among nerds (which I participated in myself of course) who understood all that and by and large weren't arrogant enough to think that charop exercises reflected actual play, let alone that the game itself should be changed based on the products of these exercises.The tier system, for example, is kind of like the "power rankings" ubiquitous in sports news. 100% opinion and somewhat tongue in cheek. Not completely random, to be sure, but hardly a reliable indicator of anything; the #1 team rarely wins it all and lower ranked teams beat higher ones all the time. The difference is that the power rankings change every week reflecting what happened in actual games, and since D&D is not played on national TV, that never happens with charop discussions. So the charop stuff isn't even as accurate as sports journalism.All this criticism about balance is kind of sadly misguided. There are still plenty of people playing 3.X/PF (let alone earlier editions) fighters, rogues, monks, bards, and so on even years after they were supposedly rendered obsolete by "balance".</blockquote>

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