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Campaign balance is a fine art, as it is extremely difficult to classify exactly. What is balanced in one campaign might not be balanced in another, by virtue of what classes, feats, and other such options are available to characters. Balance goes both ways, and it's important to realize that material that is perfectly reasonable in some games may be ridiculously overpowered or so weak as to not be worth writing down in others. A primary goal of this wiki is to help our users more easily find homebrew material that fits well within the balance their campaign already uses.
To that end, most of our articles will list a general ''category'' of balance. These categories are described heredepending on the sorts of power levels that the game supports. It should be said right off that no balance category is better or worse than any other, the only right one is the one that works for your game and your playstyle. Each category contains a number of classes, prestige classes, and character options published by Wizards of the Coast to provide further examples of material within it. The options listed here aren't intended to be used to win or lose any contests, but just to give you a good pool of work to compare our homebrew against.
Breaking things down in this way also means that an option is only overpowered or underpowered when compared with the other available options. There is material within published works that is going to be overpowered for some campaigns, just as there is material that is going to be weak in some campaigns. Sometimes that is even the same material viewed from two different games. These balance categories are an attempt to place homebrew works on this site in a greater context. If an article is listed as having a particular article balance, we believe it is best matched with other material in that category and thus appropriate for inclusion in a campaign that already primarily includes the options indicated at that level. It may overperform at some levels, it may underperform at others, and it may change based on campaign considerations regarding enemy and equipment distributions, but it shouldn't overshadow or be useless compared to other material overall.
For a complete list of articles on this wiki that are unquantifiable, [[Special:SearchByProperty/Article-20Balance/Unquantifiable|click here]].
==Legend Balance Points==
We do not have balance points for this game.
The designers of this game started from 3.x with a very clear idea of the balance that they wanted to achieve, and then set out to achieve that. For this reason there is much less variability between material within the core game, and so there are not multiple targets for homebrew to aim at. Some legend material may intentionally ignore the intended balance of the game, however, but should be marked appropriately.
==4th Edition and 4E Essentials Balance Points==
We do not have balance points for this editionof Dungeons and Dragons. This is not because there's not a range of balance in this version of Dungeons and Dragons, however. There's a rather wide range of balance levels actually, stretching from poorly selected class builds that don't actually have powers for their primary stats up to yogi-hat rangers who literally can't die and orbizards who never let the enemy act. The problem is that the extremely large amount of errata in 4th edition in conjunction with the popularity of the online character builder makes these builds tenuous at best, and the actual power level of the game itself is subject to radical change. Even if we had enough examples to specify what the different balance levels looked like at any given time we wouldn't be reasonably sure that any example would belong in the same level a few months later or that the level itself would even mean the same thing.
As a result, we have very high power classes like the [[Bane Guard (4e Class)|Bane Guard]] along side more standard classes like the [[Songweaver (4e Class)|Song Weaver]] and [[Black Lion (4e Class)|Black Lion]] with no way to indicate which is the higher powered option at first glance. Each author tends to select a similar balance point, however, even if it is different from that of other authors. Because of that, homebrew in this section by different authors with different goals may not be appropriate for different players at the same table, but homebrew by the same author as other material currently in use should be just fine. We strongly recommend that you examine each piece of 4e homebrew with an eye towards what other players in your game will be doing before allowing it into your campaign. And remember, just because it's over or underpowered for your table doesn't mean it's so for the game itself.
