Bluenose said:
Funny how some people manage to enjoy Chess, Monopoly, Starcraft, a host of sports, and a variety of other things that are remarkably balanced. And fail utterly to find them boring.
I'ma add to the chorus here, with a slightly different twist:
Personally, I think Chess is boring. It is a Solved Game. You will always loose to someone who knows more than you do. Thus, it's not balanced: there is system mastery built into it. Even two people who have similar system mastery may not be balanced (what with the White advantage).
Monopoly is also boring. It's not exactly Solved, but it is largely random who succeeds and who fails. Park Place is not balanced with Baltic Avenue. Add to that house rules that change the game around.
Starcraft is also pretty boring to me, and, like Chess, it's kind of Solved. But it's also not perfectly balanced (there's a reason everyone knows what a Zerg Rush is).
You're also not really talking about the same sort of balance. In all three games, the balance is PvP in a defined boundary: clearly if one person wins abusing a certain strategy, that strategy is unbalanced. In D&D, the balance is a much more subtle beast. You're cooperating against the DM's challenges and even then, the odds are heavily in your favor, and they MUST be: the price for failure is always very very very final. Rather than PvP balance, it's more PvE, with the balancing mechanism being: one player should not be more effective in more circumstances than other players. Which is very subtle and mostly psychological.
What this means in 5e, and with regards to the goals Mearls mentioned, I think it means that all characters need to be able to contribute to each of the three major challenges present in the D&D game. Not even necessarily in equal measure, just that they be able to have some "spotlight time" in a given session, and perhaps to do something no other character can do at least once per session.
ANYWAY
Personally, I'm really curious what this massive gulf between players and R&D was, and how they realized it was there. I'm tempted to conjecture about what it may be, but I'd really like to know what THEY saw, and how they saw it was a problem.