Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy

[Max_Killjoy]

Right, that is the point I was making.

• Fighters can be superpowered and balanced with superpowered wizards.
• Fighters can be mundane and not balanced with superpowered wizards.
• Wizards can be mundane and balanced with mundane fighters.

You can't take mundane fighters and superpowered wizards and expect any form of balance. In 3.5 a Wizard could summon/bind better fighters then the fighter while also still being a wizard. In 4E they were balanced because the Wizard was mundane. You could make a game where fighters are super and balance it with super wizards (say Tome of Battle and a Beguiler.) But mundane and super don't balance together, which is why the Guy at the Gym is seen as a fallacy. It expects one person to accept real world rules and another not to, and also that they play nicely together.

This is all true. I would add that another reason why Guy at the Gym thinking propagates is that fantasy worlds of the middle type: mundane fighters who are not balanced with superpowered wizards, are the most commonly encountered form in fantasy fiction, especially serious or 'adult' fantasy fiction. Worlds of fantasy supers - with super fighters, super wizards, or just everyone being super for some reason, tend to be poorly structured with bad worldbuilding and are often targeted at 'young adult' audiences (shounen manga is literally defined by the 'boy' demographic). Likewise, bringing wizards down to the mundane level and balancing them with warriors requires massive nerfs (4e reduces wizards, but also buffs warriors 'healing surges' and the like are anything but mundane) and severely restricts their powers, especially within the sort of quick-use timeframe most games demand. A 'wizard' whose powers take weeks to invoke isn't really a playable character.

So instead fantasy fiction produces worlds with wizard supers and nominally mundane fighters and then utilizes a variety of storytelling devices to provide an illusion of balance and they usually codify the wizards as sufficiently rare such that the mass of the population serves as a balance measure at the worldbuilding level. Neither of these methods work in games, unfortunately.

This creates a major problem in that tabletop RPGs are often trying to translate a fantasy universe that is not balanced into the form of a game that is, giving the designers an impossible task. The Wheel of Time, for example, was made into a d20 system RPG, even those people who can Channel are supers in that world and those who cannot Channel are not. D&D, has much the same problem, in that it drew upon source materials - the works of Tolkien, Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance especially - that had mundane warriors and super wizards.

What this means is that, if you pick a fantasy universe that has this imbalance in place and convert it into a game you have to determine which role the characters are going to play and all characters need to play that role in a given campaign. For instance, if you run the Wheel of Time, either everyone in the party can channel, or no one can, and the campaigns on either side of the divide will unfold very differently.

Well said, on both parts.

Exactly what I've tried to say in the past when this has come up -- "something has to give" and "an RPG is not authorial fiction, just because something works in a book or move, doesn't mean it will work in an RPG."

The fourth option that comes up is "Fighters can be called mundane on the fiction level, but be balanced with superpowered wizards on the mechanical level"... and what gives there is any notion of coherence. And yet in past discussions, that's been the option some posters very vocally and vehemently said they'd take... and insist that everyone else take, too, I guess, expressing some degree of disdain for any other listed option, dismissing them as utterly unnecessary.