Honestly, I think a large amount of it is in the presentation, not in the substance. Nobody truly wants unbalanced games. Not really. If we did, then 3e wouldn never have replaced 2e and we'd likely all be playing RIFTS. We want ... balance is such a loaded word... parity.
In some ways 3e is /less/ balanced than 2e. And a lot of people have played RIFTS enjoyed it.
Really, D&D has been a successful game for a long time without being very well-balanced at all. While some of the rejection of 4e can reasonably be attributed to nostalgia, the usual resistance to change further abetted and amplified by the SRD/Pathfinder, and nerdrage, I can't reject out of hand the possibility that there's something else.
D&D, as the 'first,' RPG has the strongest name recognition of any RPG, by far. That means a lot of new players start with it, simply because they're likely to have heard of it, and it's easy to find a game. It's also had really quite poor class balance for almost it's entire history (excepting 4e, of course). And, it's always had a system of rewarding frequent play with greater character power (experience). Put two together and you have an environment in which experienced players have a continual stream of new players to over-awe with their established characters and/or (particularly with 3e) their hard-won system mastery.
The classes don't have to be exactly the same, but, they have to at least be playing the same game.
Nod. Common structure, well-defined keywords, clear rules - they all help with that.
AD&D largely did achieve this for fighter types. The fighter types dealt so much damage that if you wanted something dead, the fighter was certainly a viable option.
AD&D had a long history. At first, fighters had little more going for them than the possibility of rolling an 18/00 strength - and magic items could grant that or 'Giant Strength' to fighters, clerics, and even thieves. Certainly once UA weapon specialization dovetailed with the obscure TWFing rules in the DMG, specific sorts of fighters became quisinarts of doom, and stayed that way in 2e. I don't think that damage specialization really balanced the great versatility of Vancian casters, but it certainly helped keep them relevant through the 'sweet spot' of mid-levels (~4-7, IMHO).
The thief was a bit more problematic but, honestly, I saw the workaround for this with the multiclassing options. An MU/Thief or a Cleric/Thief, or ever a Fighter/Thief needed about the same xp as the other classes because thief xp was so low. A Fighter/Thief doesn't need a whole lot more xp than a ranger, for example. So, you're not really giving up anything.
Yeah, that's a workaround.
That's kludgy though, so, I'd prefer the thief/rogue to get some serious loving - like it did in 3e. Unfortunately in 3e, the casters got so much loving that it becomes problematic. Now, there's no going back to the AD&D idea of having sharp limitations on casters because that's going to annoy far too many people who want to play casters and want to cast spells most of the time.
All true. If casters can't have sharp limitations, then they need less potent spells, or non-casters need more potent and /much/ more versatile abilities. Those are also clearly unacceptable.
Ergo, there's folks out there what hate balance.
But, if you present the classes in such a way that the descriptions show how strongly the classes are differentiated, then I think many of the criticisms go away. 4e made the mistake of trying to show how much each class was the same - they all use largely the same mechanics - and people reacted negatively to that. People want class to differentiate characters. Some people want unique mechanics for each class.
I've heard the theory that the only thing 4e really goofed on was presentation. If it was a mistake, it was an understandable one. Being up-front with the mechanical commonalities of the classes made 4e much easier to learn. That should be a boon, even to experienced players, since even they are learning a new system.
Unless, of course, the niche D&D had secretly carved out for itself was one of intellectual challenge and system-mastery rewards that thrived on the game taking some extra time and effort to learn and master. Thus the early criticism that 4e was 'dumbed down' - part of the fun was that it wasn't quick and easy to learn.
Well, I think we can have our cake and eat it too. Themes are where you differentiate characters in the game world. Make the themes actually matter, and you have two totally different characters, even though they might be the same class. The classes are the basic chasis - mostly the fundamental stuff like AC, HD, attack bonuses, casting capabilities and whatnot. So, classes are going to look fairly similar on paper - just like if you look at two classes in the D20 SRD, they don't look terribly different. Open a tab in your browser to a d20 SRD Druid and a D20 SRD Wizard and those pages look pretty close. They should, both classes largely use the same mechanics.
That is another reason "the classes are samey" never really flew. 3e classes, especially casters who shared many of the same spells, could be pretty 'samey' too. The real difference wasn't homogeneity but parity. Without trap choices among classes, the challenge of mastering the system is lessened. 4e did eventually bury itself in a mountain of trap /feats/, but I guess that was too little, too late.
Sorry to ramble on so much. Just sort of following a train of thought to see where it goes.
Interesting post. May your train of thought never de-rail.
