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I recently watched my wife playing Final Fantasy VI for the first time. I noted how similar the various characters were to classical D&D classes, and watched how she choose her adventuring parties. At the end of the day, the characters that performed well or served an exotic function (like the Rogue and the Moogle) became the central heroes in her parties, while those that performed less spectacularly spent most of their time on the airship. I noticed a similar process to Job/class selection in Final Fantasy V, again, with many of the classes traditional to D&D being obvious, such as the Bard, Ranger, Wizard, Cleric, and Monk.

I noticed other things too, like the classes that always went first and had powerful attacks becoming quick favorites to feature. Additionally, while she had something like 12-14 characters to choose from, she went with her more powerful wizards with the highest level spells, rather than the more interesting balanced characters. I asked her to make a comparison, for example, between Blitz and Sword Technique, and traditional 1st edition Monks and Kensai, and how she thought about balance. She said she didn't want to remove these characters from her adventuring party, even though the other characters often didn't even get to act, and while she recognized them as "broken" and overpowered, she didn't seem to care, or desire to ban them from her play.

There's no particular class that I'm judging here, or even the power curve specifically. If I had to make a comparison, it would be previous editions to the playtest materials, and I would then say the following:

the characters level too fast and
the characters gain too little when leveling

I guess it would be the equivalent of having 100 promotions at work each year and getting a 1 cent raise every other promotion. I am reminded of an old Diku Mud where I had the ability to level 1000 times, but characters weren't really viable until level 500. An old 16 bit video game was perfectly capable of handling game balance effectively even with absolutely ridiculous spells and powers - characters with 8 attacks per round, spells that completely countered other spells or were capable of slaying dragons in one hit - yet these games lasted for dozens of hours, through thousands of combat scenes. Why did that balance last so long? I see people in my city struggle to have a game last more than 3 sessions totalling 12 hours of play. Normally you aren't supposed to compare video games to table top, and normally you aren't supposed to promote power in a roleplaying game, but I think it's time we move beyond these outdated traditions, and put it all out there. I have a friend in the other room who's been playing some video game for the last unknown number of hours. That's what he is doing instead of playing D&D. And when he is done, he and thousands just like him will probably go play magic the gathering at some hobby store, where they will continue to pull out their strongest - not their weakest cards and try to stack the deck in their favor - because at the end of the day, people want the best chance to succeed.

I've found roleplayers in my neck of the woods will have multiple characters and will swap out or even switch games if they don't like the flow. Some will even act foolishly and die rather than pursue a dead end character, and some DMs are more than happy to help them along - though this is pretty rare. I think the fact that all the players have been in Dark Sun AD&D at least once, and are familiar with the process of character swapping, that they just don't care. When we were doing LARP in another state, they would let you retire one character to get a huge EXP rebate to build another. Once in a while, storyline would demand that character be played temporarily, and then you would swap back to your next. Finally, I'm in at least one game where a player (the same one playing video games right now) has two very different characters and the storyteller allows them to swap periodically between the two. DMs in this area tend to have very high fatality rates for newer characters, so it is in your best interest to build the best one you can. I once had a questing Paladin who was slain in his first combat due to a high initiative on the part of a group of monsters that one-hit-killed me before I even got to make an attack roll. Naturally, the next character I made for that game was built very differently.

There's an important difference between FF and D&D that you're overlooking.  In FF, the player plays the entire adventuring party, so it's entirely irrelevant to her whether one character outshines the rest.  It's always her character outshining.  In D&D, when one powergamer outshines his non-powergamer comrades, his spotlight time is subtracting from their spotlight time.  If everyone powergames equally, the DM can just throw tougher encounters (including non-combat encounters) and the game works reasonably well (not perfectly, because the DM must constantly retune just how far he has to high-ball encounters to keep the game challenging, but reasonably well).  But increasing the differential between good and bad options doesn't necessarily make powergamers happier or even increase their chances of success as it just turns up the speed of the treadmill (or gives up and just says "you win" all the time, which isn't any better).  If some people don't powergame, they get fewer opportunities to shine and they do so less dramatically than those that do, and their fun suffers.  Can they still have fun with gimped characters?  Of course.  But I think they would have more fun on average if they were on a more even footing with their power-gamer brothers, at least if putting them on an even footing didn't prevent them from building and fleshing out the character concepts they wanted.  

A similar thing goes for MtG.  It's a competitive game, so of course everyone should do their best to maximize their chance of success.  But you'd be hard pressed to argue that it wouldn't be a better game if victory depended more on strategy and synergy than on who bought more cards more recently than their opponent.  It makes sense to allow deck-building skill to factor into your chances of victory, but every player should have an equally good pool of options to draw from to keep the game fair.  When "powergamers" are drawing from a different pool from "role players" because the flavorful options are mechanically crap and the mechanically good options are flavorless, that even footing is taken away in the same way that Magic takes it away by letting you buy your way to a better pool.  

I don't hate on powergamers, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to build the best character you can build and I don't think doing so in any way inhibits your ability to build deep characters with personality and role play them to the hilt.  But I think that the mechanical power disparity between options should be limited as much as humanly possible, so that those who don't pay attention to mechanical benefit end up equally able to contribute to the mechanical portions of the game.  After all, those who ignore anything but mechanical benefit are equally able (if not equally willing) to contribute to the non-mechanical portions of the game.

Nov 17, 2012 -- 1:26PM, ankiyavon wrote:

Nov 17, 2012 -- 12:56PM, mexrage wrote:

Well, there is also the 2nd thing about jRPGs...you either play a complete party not a single character (FF6 doesn't have a central protagonist), or even if you play a character a protagonist, he remain part of the story, even when not in the "active party"...

Terra is very much the protaganist of FF6.

FF1 is the only FF game that can really be said to not have a protaganist, and that's because it has no PCs (it has party members, but they're basically just chits on a gameboard).

Nope...Terra is the first character you play on FF6, but she is not the protagonist.  If i would call someone a protagonist, i would call Locke, because he spend the most time as an avaible and even forced party member into the active party, and even Locke and Terra become optional recruitable party members after "that" happends.  With Celes, Setzer and Edgar being the only non optional character in your "total party" to end the game