Consider this piece of equipment/rule:
Musical Instrument (small):
This could be any old musical instrument you can carry: a violin, bagpipes, a triangle, whatever. Playing a musical instrument requires a dexterity check. Successfully playing the instrument gives you a bonus to reaction/charisma rolls with nonhostile beings able to appreciate music. Failure gives you a minus.
Now, right off there are people who'll tell you Musical Instrument (small) is wretchedly broken. Why? Because for a small price, any character with a dex over 10 can buy a piece of equipment which will give them a bonus to their charisma checks more than half the time. So (they say) half of all PCs (or more than half if you do anything but 3d6-in-order) will buy instruments and so will half of all NPCs. The upside is mechanically superior to the downside in a predictable way, and the price is an amount of gp that's negligible for any PC who has had any adventures. Period. It's a good deal--why wouldn't they take it?
Then every group is at least half musicians even if their characters are supposed to be badass Conans and austere sorcerers and various other individuals of the non-ordinarily-lute-wielding persuasion.
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Now the people who'd say this are awful.
Why? Because nobody who's ever played a game would think that. Because it ignores the fact that hardly anyone is going to go to all the trouble to have their character play a fiddle if they don't want a character who plays the fiddle. It's not like you have to just say "I play the fiddle" you have to, like, talk to villagers and say what you're playing and hear jokes about the damn fiddle and, in general, take precious minutes out of the 2-4 hours they get to spend playing D&D to talk about music and villagers and trying to acquire henchmen instead of talking about sunlight falling on their steel as the bloodmist-thickened wind writhes in their ears.
If you get a fiddle it's because you want to do that. And that's fine.
And anyone who is going to do all that--someone who is going to play through a scene they don't want to play through just to get a mechanical advantage--is a boring person with no sense of style who you should kick out of your game.
And this pretty much goes for all kinds of supposedly unbalancing tactics in the game.
Yes, a balanced game is about trading that advantage for this resource: but the ultimate reward is fun and the ultimate resource is the players' time. If a player cannot see that they play for every characters' every maneuver is paid for in this most precious and unrecoverable of commodities, they are hopeless no matter what system they're in.
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Musical Instrument (small):
This could be any old musical instrument you can carry: a violin, bagpipes, a triangle, whatever. Playing a musical instrument requires a dexterity check. Successfully playing the instrument gives you a bonus to reaction/charisma rolls with nonhostile beings able to appreciate music. Failure gives you a minus.
Now, right off there are people who'll tell you Musical Instrument (small) is wretchedly broken. Why? Because for a small price, any character with a dex over 10 can buy a piece of equipment which will give them a bonus to their charisma checks more than half the time. So (they say) half of all PCs (or more than half if you do anything but 3d6-in-order) will buy instruments and so will half of all NPCs. The upside is mechanically superior to the downside in a predictable way, and the price is an amount of gp that's negligible for any PC who has had any adventures. Period. It's a good deal--why wouldn't they take it?
Then every group is at least half musicians even if their characters are supposed to be badass Conans and austere sorcerers and various other individuals of the non-ordinarily-lute-wielding persuasion.
Now the people who'd say this are awful.
Why? Because nobody who's ever played a game would think that. Because it ignores the fact that hardly anyone is going to go to all the trouble to have their character play a fiddle if they don't want a character who plays the fiddle. It's not like you have to just say "I play the fiddle" you have to, like, talk to villagers and say what you're playing and hear jokes about the damn fiddle and, in general, take precious minutes out of the 2-4 hours they get to spend playing D&D to talk about music and villagers and trying to acquire henchmen instead of talking about sunlight falling on their steel as the bloodmist-thickened wind writhes in their ears.
If you get a fiddle it's because you want to do that. And that's fine.
And anyone who is going to do all that--someone who is going to play through a scene they don't want to play through just to get a mechanical advantage--is a boring person with no sense of style who you should kick out of your game.
And this pretty much goes for all kinds of supposedly unbalancing tactics in the game.
Yes, a balanced game is about trading that advantage for this resource: but the ultimate reward is fun and the ultimate resource is the players' time. If a player cannot see that they play for every characters' every maneuver is paid for in this most precious and unrecoverable of commodities, they are hopeless no matter what system they're in.
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