Because obviously, someone who happened to pick the right class should be able to break the campaign wide open, while someone who picked the "wrong" one should struggle mightily.
Yes, that's the fun of RPG. Picking a weaker class and still dominate in the end is more of a challange and therein lies the fun.
Some people enjoy being OP. Let them. I don't mind mages being ridicolously OP demigods, that's what they are supposed to be.
Yeah, no. If they want to be OP, make them mod for OP-ness. And the idea that mages should be OP demigods? Why do you think WOTC nerfed them so heavily in 4 and 5e? Because I'm pretty sure they weren't meant to be that, or people were just finding them unfun as fuck.
Also, struggling to do something as one class while another can do it with just the flick of a wrist, with no way of knowing which is which is not fun in my opinion. It's just stupid game design. Gaming as power fantasy has never appealed to me in the least (well, at least not since I turned thirteen, but at that point things were easing off in my life, so I wanted more challenge).
And show me how a weaker class in 3.5e can dominate in the end when stacked up against a stronger class if both are minmaxed (I know we're talking about 5e but the people who decry balance usually go back to 3.5e as a great system). Here, I'll give you two classes to work with: the Monk (tier five) vs the Druid (tier one) (
tier system for 3.5e for convenience)
Imbalance works best when it's within a certain limit (so that at least most well played options are viable and none are game-breaking), kept in check, and easily remedied if things get too out of hand.
Get out of WHOSE hand? This is not a competitive multiplayer RPG, this is a single player game that can be played as a cooperative multiplayer game.
Hint: this is a game based on D&D, so balance in D&D should carry over here, as all the people complaining about it not being close enough to D&D can attest (and while D&D 5e isn't perfectly balanced, it is reasonably well balanced based on my reading of online discussions. Well, aside from the ranger which is getting a complete rework here). As to whose hands, easy: the GM's or the groups.
Really, fuck overpowered characters in a social game like D&D.
LoL what? As I said this is single player xD
Based on the rules of a multiplayer game. And, near as I can tell, most singleplayer games try to achieve a balance between selectable characters, classes or whatever unless they're specifically marked as easy, hard, or whatever. (not always successfully, but at least we have patching now, so it can get better) It's singleplayer so balance shouldn't matter goes against all game design I have ever seen, and I've been gaming since the early nineties, as well. Balance doesn't need to be perfect here, but it still needs to be thought about. I love
this reddit thread discussing the concept.
Or could you explain how having someone basically do everything in a campaign while everyone else is rendered redundant and sitting on their haunches could at all be considered fun for the non-op characters?
You do realize that single-character players exist right? People who don't use companions and such? Yeah. Why should their fun be ruined in the name of balance? Pro tip: it shouldn't be.
Also your philosophy is exactly what leads to all characters being exactly the same apart from some cosmetics. If you want to know where balance leads, look at WoW MoP, where every class could heal themselves and pseudo-tank while dealing good damage. Basically balance always ends up meaning that everyone is the same with cosmetic differences like, oh I don't know, the races in 5th edition already are.
That's a criticism I read a lot, but never have seen in practice. And, as long as the game designers know what they're doing, it's entirely possible to have roughly balanced classes that play completely differently (roughly balanced meaning that, while they play differently, they should have roughly the same difficulty in doing x task, like clearing a room full of enemies). I had an expansive post on this idea in the balance thread, actually.
