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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SageMinerve" data-source="post: 6237978" data-attributes="member: 69067">If your gripe is with the way 4th ed achieved class balance, then I agree with you. It didn't bother me as much as it seemed to bother a lot of people, but achieving balance through different paths would be a desirable design objective, to me at least.Regarding non-combat contributions balancing combat contributions, I totally disagree with you. Not with the idea itself, but with the feasibility of it.To take your example, how would you balance the rogue's diplomatic skills with the fighter's combat prowess? You would have to:a) Make the rogue invest as much character creation/leveling up in diplomacy as the fighter invests in combat abilities;b) Enforce, as a GM, the fact that the rogue is the one that has the ability to really sway NPCs with his silver tongue.The problem is with (b). Depending on your style of roleplay, when it comes to dealing with NPCs, there are 2 broad possibilities:1) Players can act as their characters without any constraints from their character sheets. A lot of people play this way because the PC-NPC interaction flows more naturally without being stopped to check for skills or abilities. That means that players with more conversational abilities will naturally dominate the roleplay aspect of the game, and that there are no consequences to not investing heavily in diplomatic abilities and skills. If combat balance is not enforced by the rules, this turns into a game where PCs will dominate other PCs. Not good IMO.2) Players can only act as their stats/skills allow them. That means, at a minimum, making a check at the beginning of an encounter to see if your PC can sway an NPC or not, and then roleplaying the result. It can be "granulated" very finely to the point of making a check each time you bring a new argument to the conversation. At that extreme, social encounters turn into a kind of social combat. Some versions of Fate use this. In my experience, not a lot of D&D players are fans of this solution because it doesn't feel very natural to fragment a social encounter this way, but it has the advantage of ensuring that diplomatic characters bring as much to the table as combat.Solution #1 doesn't really allow for equally important and interesting contributions from everyone. All else being equal, the rogue ends up contributing less than the fighter.Solution #2 enforces balance by stripping some players the possibility of really bringing it all in broad segments of a game session, which can be quite frustrating.</blockquote>

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