A lot of designers and aficionados, especially in the OSR, say they don’t care about balance. They usually mean that they don’t care about combat prowess or even power level. If everybody is interesting and having fun, who cares if one PC can kill a horde of goblins and one can’t

This is fine. We’ve said it ourselves. However what most players mean is that they want a balanced NARRATIVE IMPACT. If you rarely get into combat then being a combat master doesn’t have a huge narrative impact. A spy master in the wilderness is less useful.

This creates a tension between the stated design focus of the game and the player experience. Traditional rpgs are a team exercise, and if one person gets to make all the decisions and hogs all the spotlight and makes all the pivotal plays then it’s less fun for the others.

So, be careful when you say you don’t care about balance and design to that. There SHOULD be a relatively even amount of engagement at the table regardless of what choices the players made with their characters (or got unlucky with during character creation rolls).

As with most design problems, non trad games have tried really hard to “solve” this. The more collaborative and narrative a game is the less diegetic balance or in game power matters (such as games that structure sessions as “scenes” and “beats” and give spotlight to all).

Design for and manage narrative impact balance. The more trad your game is, the more that means power level balance (combat or task resolution) matters. The broader your character’s power level, the more you need to cater to each tier (through scenes or authorial control).