True, and very important. Unfortunately, it’s a point that many game developers and a lot of players still do not seem to have grasped, or we wouldn’t have so many arguments about “power balance” and endless attempts to fiddle with and fine-tune character classes (in games that use classes) to make them more “fairly balanced”. It’s all about the question, Do all players have the chance to participate meaningfully and get screen time? Not necessarily equal screentime, but as much as they wish (some players are more laid-back and don’t actually want so much screen time), unless, in the case of attention-whores, this unfairly cuts into everyone else’s screen time. And then there are the players who just aren’t motivated to do anything, anyway; trying to force roleplaying screen time on them is a useless endeavor. They just want to hack orcs 24/7 or sit back and be passively entertained .

Unfortunately, in games like Shadowrun and D&D the rules talk mostly about team combat and reaching quest goals, not about storytelling, and consequently adventures are often played in a way that punishes “weaker” characters who cannot keep up because they do not have enough experience/skill points or the wrong kind of skill set. But if the character cannot contribute to the team goal, the player starts to feel superfluous and frustrated.

Other games, like Ars Magica, GURPS Discworld, GURPS Celtic Myth and Call of Cthulhu demonstrate that you can make a group made up of character of different power levels work, and make the game enjoyable.

Of course, this depends on having a game master who does not play favorites, and having players who do not use their more powerful characters to metaphorically or literally push the “weaker” characters out of the story. “You’re useless, so we make you stay in this locked room until we come back. It’s for your own best.”

If the gamemaster plays favorites, skill and power level or story relevance doesn’t matter anymore anyway, as the favored character becomes a Mary Sue that can accomplish anything anyway… the universe reshapes itself to suit her/him.

I was once a great proponent of “game fairness” which meant (if i.e. you are playing GURPS or similar point-based systems) making sure that everyone gets the same number of starting points. But then I met a gamemaster who used this “point fairness doctrine” like a straight jacket, instead of a rough guideline to make sure different character concepts do not get totally out of hand. She’s rather kill a character concept dead than grant a few more points on credit. (In a Changeling: the Dreaming game!)

She’d punish a more active character, i.e. an aging knight geared towards melee combat and diplomacy, claiming he was “dominating” the story, at the same time ignoring all attempts by the player to integrate the more physically powerful greyhaired character with the group of fresh-faced young adventurers, for example by making the knight the self-appointed bodyguard of the witch child character. Mind you, this was the old World of Darkness 1.0 Changeling, where starting characters needed to pick an age bracket (child, teenager or adult) but had the same starting points… in fact, child characters got more points in the magic mystic changeling powers while older characters had on the whole more disadvantages, and everyone got the same number of skill points and attribute points. When ‘ported into GURPS rules, this imbalance became a lot more visible. But instead of solving it via storytelling, the group tried to solve it via rules mechanics. Which blew up the game.

There is an edges and flaws system, where one of the flaws which is worth quite a few points is called “Borrowed time”, and literally means that your character is only going to live for a few months for whatever reason.

In my opinion, flawed but brillliant characters only really work if you are building scenarios of a campaign around the idea. – also, make sure that the other players are aware that the character isn’t all brilliant, and that the player playing the cursed character is able to handle it.

Cheers.

how can I, as a DM/Storyteller, encourage more women to participate in roleplaying, when all the female roleplayers in the vicinity are either ex-girlfriends, or women my girlfriend would like to strangle bare-handedly, or both?

Start new characters at level 4 or so, have the DM throw some level 10 monsters them, when the players get eaten and complain that the campaign is too hard tell them that was just the intro and have their patron resurrect them like this.

Oh and a -5 or more charisma penalty wouldn’t be too out there either… but on the up side you might end up like Morty with troll regen!