quote:
you're saying it's impossible to play a d&d game where some players are higher level than others?
I'm saying it's asking a lot out of people to do a game where any number of other people are going to be better at more or less everything they can do, and without anything like the handicaps the hands down weakest group will have on top of that. Suggesting that's about being overcompetitive or needing to feel like they can kill everyone, or can't game with someone is a bit much. It's nothing more than that many people when they make a character, like to feel a character can contribute meaningfully to resolving the challenges of a storyline by way of what they're good at, without feeling like the ST is basically just finding excuses for them to somehow still be useful despite the evident gaps.
It's frankly not even intentionally "showing someone up", someone will note their capacities to resolve a problem, just for wanting to resolve it, and it's clear in doing so they're just that much better at doing so, something I've seen any number of times. At which point it just is what it is. Characters that function on considerably different levels of capacity will demonstrate that just for using that capacity.
It's maybe kind of a bummer if you make a character and you find that in terms of resolving a given issue, you're basically sidekick scale effective at most. I've seen various crossover games on rpol and they basically boil down to that the vampires don't manage much of anything significant by comparison while mages, werewolves, and what have you pretty much get most things done in any meaningful sense, be it combat, non combat, what have you, and the vamp players stop doing much out of a feeling of comparative pointlessness, that it's only a lot of heavy handed and obvious contrivance keeping them still relevant. Which for some people isn't great.
You seem to focus on that the idea here is that people are showing a deficiency as players to bring up these issues, but even cooperating, some characters will be ineffectual by comparison at working towards a common goal by simple virtue of the imbalance between types. That's what I'm getting at here.
And I suppose that being a 5th level character expected to contribute alongside a party of 10th level characters, as far as your D&D comparison, doesn't really sound like all that much fun.
If you get people that are interested anyway, more power to you.