If you're reasonably confident of playing a long-term campaign, shifting balance within the party over the course of said campaign can be an interesting roleplaying challenge.
I have always had a strong preference for character classes to play in ways that feel distinct, which leads me to be disinclined to solutions that feel to blur different classes into each other or make them work overly similarly. The old "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" issue seems to still be a thing without a really good solution in any big-name game; I am unhappy with approaches that actively nerf magic, or try to make the whole game feel like a 3e campaign capped at level 6, but I fear that so long as there is a vocal portion of the fanbase objecting to their Plain Guy With Sword feeling "unrealistic" or "anime-ish", we're not going to get something focused as much on making high-level fighters feel a scale of powerful that keeps up with high-level wizards, which is the direction I would favour.
I rather like "first-level characters aren't Indiana Jones and unless they are careful they will be the decorative skeletons that warn Indiana Jones there's a trap here" as a general paradigm, but first-level wizards who have a significant chance of dying if they anger a housecat did strike me as overdoing it. It's harder for me to feel higher levels as the scale of achievement I'd really like them to be if the early bits were too easy, and it's definitely a hard thing to balance the early levels feeling too easy with them killing people too easily, though I can think of a few 3.5 and PF low-level adventures that do an impressive job.
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Date: 2019-01-26 12:18 am (UTC)I have always had a strong preference for character classes to play in ways that feel distinct, which leads me to be disinclined to solutions that feel to blur different classes into each other or make them work overly similarly. The old "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" issue seems to still be a thing without a really good solution in any big-name game; I am unhappy with approaches that actively nerf magic, or try to make the whole game feel like a 3e campaign capped at level 6, but I fear that so long as there is a vocal portion of the fanbase objecting to their Plain Guy With Sword feeling "unrealistic" or "anime-ish", we're not going to get something focused as much on making high-level fighters feel a scale of powerful that keeps up with high-level wizards, which is the direction I would favour.
I rather like "first-level characters aren't Indiana Jones and unless they are careful they will be the decorative skeletons that warn Indiana Jones there's a trap here" as a general paradigm, but first-level wizards who have a significant chance of dying if they anger a housecat did strike me as overdoing it. It's harder for me to feel higher levels as the scale of achievement I'd really like them to be if the early bits were too easy, and it's definitely a hard thing to balance the early levels feeling too easy with them killing people too easily, though I can think of a few 3.5 and PF low-level adventures that do an impressive job.