Tony Vargas
Legend
You may not realize it, but you've yet to say anything in this thread that h4ters hadn't said thousands of times before. It's a tall order, leaving behind such a concerted campaign of misinformation.
It's easy for me to empathize with the stereotypical 'why' in the case of grognards. I played this game from the beginning or darn near, for 25+ years it didn't change that much, it had problems, nothing's perfect, but a lot of other games tried to do better and got nowhere - now you want to change the game and get rid of those 'problems?' That's as much as telling me I've been an idiot for 25+ years, playing a broken game. How dare you.
For that matter, I'm not much harder to empathize with the stereotypical optimizer reaction. 3e characters were awesomely customizable, and the better you were at customizing them, the better your character. It takes a lot of work to master the game, it's part of the fun of it, sometimes most of the fun of it is in finding the optimal build, not the inevitable results of playing the optimal build. It all changes incrementally as the game expands, but to just throw all that away all at once and re-start from 0? "'T ain't right, 't ain't fair, 't ain't proper, 't ain't fitting." (Yeah, D&D wasn't the only thing from the 70s that's come back lately.)
That and, "Seriously, WotC, /again/? 3.5 wasn't a blatant enough money-grab, you have to go and roll another edition and soak us all for core books /again/?!?" ;P
People often aren't even talking about the same things when they say 'balance,' as rapidly becomes evident when you compare visions of what 'perfect balance' might be like, for instance.
The definition I like to use for balance is that a game is better-balanced, the more choices it presents to players that are both meaningful and viable. (On the flip side, a meaningless, but viable choice would be 'chaff' the choice exists, but it doesn't matter, while the really pernicious examples are choices that seam meaningful but are non-viable they're the 'traps' that games can be notorious for, and the ultimate balance-bomb is the obvious-best choice, which renders all others non-viable.)
'Realistic' is an oxymoron in that comparison. At best, you can have genre-fidelity or successful modeling of the source of inspiration. D&D, ironically, especially so when it's been imbalanced most strongly in the direction of overpowering the Wizards inspired by Merlin, did not model Merlin at all well. Not that a D&D wizard of reasonable level couldn't perform any magical feat attributed to Merlin in Le Mort d'Arthur, just that he'd have a lot of spell left over after doing them all in one day. Similarly, Gandalf, 5th level Magic-user.
(OK, that's an ancient one, sorry.)'Sufficient balance' can be, like the sufficient support you find in it for totem, none. That is, if balance is something you actively abhor.
But, seriously, 5e neither aims for nor achieves balance on it's own, neither class or encounter balance. Balance, if desired, is left up to the DM to impose. It /does/ give the DM plenty of latitude, and a few quite powerful tools, to do that, though.
Relative to 3e. Which is like saying "come on in, it's nice and cool in this volcano - compared to the heart of the sun!"
Fairly early on 4e introduced Inherent Bonuses, which let the DM flip an option switch and reduce or do away with magic items entirely without upsetting 'da math.' A big part of that was that magic items were toned down in terms of both absolute power and importance in customizing characters (with the slack taken up by powers and other build options), but also in that there weren't magical choices that were obligatory (so a party lacking a caster with CLW, had to have a wand for healing, for the most obvious instance).
So, you could /very/ easily ignore wealth/level & magic item expectations in 4e, and do so without much impacting the range of adventures and challenges you could undertake.
Going the other way, being profligate with magic, could temporarily put the PCs ahead of the curve, but not insanely so - eventually they'd grow into overpowered gear.
The magic-independence didn't start or end with items, either. You could run an all-martial party with no casters and still handle challenges. You could run a campaign world that had little or even on magic just as smoothly.
It was one of the ways in which 4e supported /more/ styles than D&D had before or has since. And, it's a direct consequence of it being more robustly balanced. There wasn't a single tight formula - you must have a cleric to provide healing/turn undead and a thief to be killed by find/remove traps; you must have +X weapons and a caster or Wand of Y & Scrolls of PDQ; you must have 'days' of 6-8 med/hard encounters punctuated by 2-3 short rests - that was obligatory to keep the game on an even keel dictating the shape or pacing of the campaign and conceptual choices of the players.
It varies some, but the bottom line is most people don't play D&D. Most of them never try it, most of those who do don't play it long. Part of the hobby's mystique, perhaps, is that even as 'nerd culture' mainstreams, D&D is staying comparatively insular.
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