GURPS and Warhammer FRP are about tied for problems in making character concepts seem viable, in my experience. Warhammer announces very much up-front that its races are unbalanced, though, so you can see that problem coming. They are not kidding. We decided quickly that a party with both favored and unfavored races was a recipe for disaster, and stopped doing it. The range of encounters which would challenge a same-cost character of the two races not only wasn't the same, it *didn't overlap*. This made scenario design nearly impossible. Too bad for the player who wanted to do an elf or dwarf--the best solution seemed to be having something with basically human stats but the label "elf" or "dwarf" stuck on. Feng Shui had some problems--pity the poor Ninja!--but they didn't seem as bad. Perhaps I'm more tolerant when the game essentially doesn't have a point-cost mechanic at all. Ars Magica gave me a lot of trouble as a GM with character "balance"-- it does not set out to be balanced, but as he got more experienced my player would give me PCs I couldn't deal with at all. Things like having a Spot skill of 35 on a 1-10 scale really threw me. We ended up ruling out a lot of character types, particularly the fighter/mage he came up with--I just could not appropriately challenge that character. Incredibly effective and with a total glass jaw--there was no zone between "this is not a problem" and "oops, I'm dead." I find that spotlight balance--not necessarily game balance, though that helps--is utterly essential. A lot of people assume balance is to keep different players from being angry at each other. But in my hands, if one character's niche is dominated by another's, and I am playing 6 characters at once, the dominated one will never get any spotlight (after all, he doesn't have a full-time player to advocate for him) and never develop much personality, leading to a vicious circle and a failed character design. AD&Dv3 or 3.5 work well for me at low to medium level; the class system protects niches well enough. We had a lot of fun with Shadowrun but we hacked it so heavily that I don't think I can comment on the original rules; its character generation system definitely struck me as unusable as written. I hate the roleplaying consequences of giving PCs too few skill points so that they cannot take any flavor skills-- flavor is really important when you have 6 PCs. (We add +2 skill points/level in AD&Dv3 and v3.5.) Storyteller was an almighty mess, but we didn't stick with it very long. We have a Storyteller-based homebrew that works really well for me for everything but combat--I despair of getting a stable combat system out of those mechanics. We use it for low-combat campaigns. If I had to get a 6-PC campaign up and running quickly, I would certainly use either Feng Shui or AD&Dv3.5 for it. Both have enough niches, and clear enough niche protection, that the player and GM don't have to sweat blood over the issue initially. A lot of systems are ruled out by the fact that it's all one player can do to control one or two PCs--or at least, I don't have the multitasking skills to run 6 Hero PCs. Shadowrun was marginal in this regard. I haven't done extended campaigns in any other systems. Oh, there was a Lords of Creation game when I was a grad student. Character niches were okay at char-gen but inexorably and rapidly destroyed by advancement. You practically had no choice but to niche-poach. Killed the game eventually. There are also imbalances between characters of the same type. It seems to me, though, that an imbalance between two characters who more or less do the same thing (for example, two melee fighters) is a lot easier to diagnose, and a lot more severe, than an imbalance between characters with very different areas of expertise. If your character isn't getting enough spotlight because he does X and another PC does Y, and Y is happening more often, you can try to make X happen more often. You can argue for use of stealth or diplomacy to solve a problem rather than combat, for example. The player has some power here. If your character isn't getting enough spotlight because he does X and another PC also does X, but much better, that's a lot tougher to deal with. I once had two GURPS characters who were both melee combatants with relatively similar skills, so it was dead obvious that one was hugely superior to the other in every important respect. No matter how you changed the game, unless you made melee combat irrelevant, one of those characters would always outshine the other. I don't really expect a point-cost system to adequately balance dissimilar characters; but I'd like it to at least balance very similar ones like these. A character with many skill points may tend to dominate at least some key parts. To avoid this, one thing you might consider is giving a lot more skill points. My experience of 3rd Ed is that many characters are starved for skill points--they simply can't afford to have all the skills they might logically need, unless they are willing to have them all at unuseful levels. This really throws a lot of emphasis on the difference between high INT and low INT. If you reduce the starvation, the problem is much less. And it doesn't have the troublesome effects on the overall game that it would in many systems, because of the level cap on points per skill--you can't put those extra points all in one place and become a skill monster, you just have more skills at a level-appropriate rating than you used to. We tend to add +2 skill points across the board. I think it really helps. I might add even more, except that we collapsed several skills together (Spot and Listen, Hide and Sneak, a bunch of the fighter skills into Athletics, etc) so our skill list is significantly shorter than the book one. I haven't had the problem you describe in v3 or 3.5, though I could easily imagine having it; but we upped the skill points so early in our use of these systems that I actually have no experience with the book levels. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 12 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. 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