ExploderWizard
Hero
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why they think a game should be less like an actual sport, and more like an actual war.
We /are/ talking about a game.
Actually, as long as we're exploring reasons for prefering one ed over another, there's one I think this thread illustrates rather well.
The better balanced a game is, the more style-neutral it is. That is, the more a player can play the character he wants, the way he wants, and the DM can run the campaign he wants, the way he wants and tell the story he wants, without the player character having to suck for the sake of concept or the DM having to re-write swaths of rules.
D&D has never been among the better-balanced games. It rewards some styles of play or character concept over others. In 3e Monte Cook said the intent was to 'reward system mastery.' A bizzarely elitist idea for a game that was still often an entry point to the hobby.
I think most of us have played D&D a long time, and we've gotten used to the demands that each edition has made on us, and modified our respective styles to get the most out of them. 4e threw a monkeywrench into that by not strongly favoring a style. You might 'master' the 4e system, but you didn't get 'rewarded' for it, at least not with anything more than a fun gaming experience.
I can see how we can get used to imbalance and start to think of the imbalances within a game as 'support' for the particular style that those imbalances favor. But, I think it's a mistake to get sucked into that line of thinking - especially if 5e is to have any shot at being as all-inclusive as the marketing rhetoric surrounding it suggests.
This distinction the OP draws between 'sport' and 'war' seems like nothing more than a way of trying to make imbalance sound kinda butch and cool. Rather than what it is: merely limitting.
Sure, in 3.x, the game was badly broken, and there were all kinds of ways to leverage the broken bits (mostly spells and items) to trivialize a supposedly tough encounter, or, conversely, to get your asses kicked by a supposedly modest encounter. That's just a symptom of poor balance. Yes, it meant aproaching the game as a 'war' was the viable option, which is fine if that's the only style you think it should support. But, a balanced game would still let the DM and players aproach individual combats with the 'war' mentality. It would just require the DM to design combats with that in mind. A balanced system doesn't keep you from creating an overwhelming encounter, nor keep players from finding a way of making it less overwhelming. It just makes pegging an encounter at 'overwhelming' a good deal easier and more consistent.
Balance can mean so many things and can be applied to a game so many ways that just throwing the term around as if it only had one meaning doesn't get one anywhere.
What kind of balance are we talking about. Balance as it applies to the overall campaign or balance based purely on one aspect of the game such as round by round combat balance?
The idea of any kind of perfectly numerically balanced rpg with character types that actually feel different in capability and identity is a fantasy.Every new element that gets added to the game will throw the balance off which will require more tweaking and revision which leads to a cyclical never ending revision process, a base system that is never stable, and books that are out of date before leaving the printers.
Actual meaningful game balance always has and always will need to be supplied by the persons who are participating. Different groups have vastly variable types of balance requirements and no prepackaged book can supply one version that will satisfy all.
The underlying balance problem is that no one wants to be the bad guy. No one wants to take charge of the game and hammer it into the perfect vehicle for them. Thats what hobbyists do. Roleplaying games are very personal and are limited only by what the people playing can come up with. Any published ruleset is going to hit the balance mark for some, require some tinkering by others, and just plain not work as a baseline for some.
Rpgs have been like this forever. Find the closest thing to what you want and kick it till it becomes perfect for you. Every once in a while one may stumble upon pure perfection right out of the box. Thats awesome when it happens but it shouldn't be an expectation in this hobby. Expecting that is equal to expecting people to not be different. How boring would that be?