Lately I’ve seen that the Utility rating is often misused in its relation to the Balance rating. While one might think that the Balance and Utility ratings are self-explanatory, there is a trend of overpowered character options ranking high on Utility and poorly on Balance. To clear up the confusion, I wrote this guideline to set the record straight.

Utility is a measure of an article’s ability to give players more options, and Balance is a measure of that article’s power compared to others available to characters of the same level.

One would think that an overpowered ability would receive a high utility rating, with the justification that any character would love to have it. On the contrary; an ability that’s overpowered effectively restricts a character’s options. If the ability is available, a character would more or less be insane not to take it. An overpowered ability effectively outmodes every other choice in the game. This gross elimination of options should result in a low utility rating.

On the other hand, sometimes an article presents a very interesting idea that would add an intriguing new option for players and GMs alike – but the numbers don’t match up, and perhaps it’s too weak or powerful compared to other abilities of that level. In this case, it should receive a high Utility rating, but a poor Balance rating – the article had a good concept, but it was executed poorly.

On the third hand, an ability might be perfectly balanced for the level it’s written for – but it’s either much too specific to a certain type of campaign (such as content tied closely to the author’s homebrew campaign setting), or not usable by the vast majority of players (such as a prestige class available only to monsters with levels in yet another prestige class). Alternately, it could be an article that attempts to fill a niche already filled by official game content (such as a homebrew “Berserker” class, though the raging warrior role is already filled well by the Barbarian). In any of these cases, the article would receive a good Balance rating, but a low rating in Utility.

Utility is not just the rating of an ability’s power – keep this in mind when critiquing articles on the website. More consistent critique helps authors create better content, and helps users pick out articles for their campaign worlds, so if you follow these guidelines, the additional content ratings become more helpful for everyone!