this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I mean... personally I'd feel more irrelevant if there was an OP dude in the party while everyone else was just an average player. But overall? If you have a shitty DM, maybe people could feel irrelevant but balancing a game is just part of the job for a DM. There are plenty of situations I can think of off the top of my head where you can actually empower the other players by having threats that they need to overcome to save the "OP character". Or situations in which the OP character has to hold stuff back while the other PCs are dealing with other stuff.
A challenge should be tailored to the party, true, but the party is made of individuals. You have to play to ALL of their strengths and weaknesses. Focusing on just the OP will fuck over everyone else and ignoring him will fuck over everyone else.
It really depends.
I'm thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they're built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.
There's no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer "no", or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.
If we're talking 5e, that's all out the window then. If 3.5's power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.
And, of course, there's lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5's power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.