When you have a mixed group of four or five players who are building sensible, well balanced characters, and a couple or three players who are building wombats, you can't take the zen approach and let them hoist themselves by their own petards. That is pretty much my usual approach, and I allow a pretty broad power mix in my campaign. But when one player is running a character with a 12dvc and 15pts of defense, I simply cannot allow another to bring in a character with a 12dcv, 30pts of resistant defense and 3/4 damage reduction. Sure, first character will shine out of combat, and the powermonster will be like a fish out of water in an investigative scenario. But when it comes down to the fight, the character who can do any straighforward damage to the monster at all will paste the character I really want in my game.

Even weasel damage (power attackes, ego attacks) are less successful against the monster who is prepared for them that the real character who bought skills and "flavor powers" instead. The villains who can stand up to the monster's 15-20d6 attack are going to ignore the better character's 9-11d6 attack. Yes, I have teams with widely varying power levels among the villains, allowing the beginning of the fight to have matched opponents. But as some characters go down, you end up with really mismatched fights. Also, you may artificially enforce upon the powerful villains that they will not first target the weaker heroes, but the monster PCs may not follow this, and may paste the weaker villains at the outset of the fight. In the end, it is better to have at least a reasonable balance of power among the PCs.

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