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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 7907890" data-attributes="member: 20564">How do players win at RPGs?They have fun. Simple as that.(If you want to disagree with that, please include what you think the majority of players would accept gaming actively not being fun to get.)So balance is not about characters being equally useful in all situations. Balance is something that happens at a table with everyone is given chances to shine and have spotlight equally.So balance isn't mechanical. But mechanics can make it a lot harder to give everyone a chance to shine. If one character dominates every scene and the the players of the other characters don't feel like they are contributing or useful, that's not balanced.So to me, the mechanical aspects of balance are giving everyone that shot - averaged over time. It doesn't (and likely can't) be perfectly balanced in every scene. But over an adventure or campaign, sure. The ranger gets to track, the rogue steals and disarms traps, both of them scout, the bard inspires with her speeches and the dwarven barbarian has long philosophic conversations and writes love poetry to help unite a shy lover and his beloved. Or whatever gives the characters chances to have the spotlight and contributes to fun.The focus of D&D on combat both in terms of theme (most D&D games follow the historical roots and have combat as a regular and important part of overcoming many challenges) as well as in terms of percentage of time spent in session, means that it's easy to mistake balancing characters in combat for balancing spotlight time for players. It's not actually the same.Other RPGs don't try to balance in combat, but mechanically balance in relevance.  Marvel Heroic Roleplay is fine with a buddy session of Captain America and Black Widow even though they don't fight in the same league.So, do I expect balance from a  mature RPG ruleset?  It's a bit of a trick question because balance of spotlight comes at the table.  What I expect from a mature RPG ruleset is that they don't make it hard for the GM to provide balance by allowing characters to be either too scene-stealing or too uninteresting.</blockquote>

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