Community

Well, I watched my wife finally beat FFVI, and now she's (not) enjoying the railroading of FFII/IV - another problem that frequently occurs in table top roleplaying, particularly with many modules.

But one of the things I learned from watching her beat Kefka, was the fact that she had 14 characters to choose from, and struggled to place more than 9 in 3 groups of 4. In other words, there were 14 characters available, 12 slots for play, and at least 5 characters she really didn't like at all. That's the thing - each of the sub groups of four is a typical D&D adventuring party. She as a player of a team immediately found flaws in characters that couldn't hold their own. While some were as much as 15 levels higher than others, only a handful - not even level dependent - really stood out as sucking bad.

Now I imagine it like this. you might have your Sabin/monk with a bazillion damage, or the Power gamy Gogo/broken but you also have some solid classes, roughly correlating to the core classes like a Fighter, Mage, or Cleric. There were solid classes, not just one solid class. There whole groups of solid characters, but there were enough classes that sucked to form their own group.

I'm feeling like - compared to some of the earlier editions of D&D, the new incarnations of the Core are not solid enough. This is particularly troubling for the long run, because you can only Flaw/Advantage esoteric classes (monks, psions, kensai, chronomancers, illusionists, undead PCs, etc.) based on the core. The core is like the pancake batter that you add stuff too to make variants like crepes, chocolate chip pancakes, belgium waffles, and so forth. If your base batter is kinda lame, your best variant class is either going to be flawed beyond play (ahah! you are immune to disease, but you must spend 20 hours a day in a temple of water to keep it) or only functional at best (ahah, your dragon slayer is capable of slaying dragons up to half their level...so at level 40, you can contribute to this level 18 adventure!)

FYI I played a lot of 1st edition where you saw things like 20die fireballs and 4+ attacks per round balanced against battles with Tiamat, Lord Soth, and Orcus. We also had the immortal rules, which I was reminded of when watching the battle with Kefka and his totally overpowered special attacks.