Oh, I'm listening, I can't always easily credit what I hear, but I haven't completely given it up yet.
But I do ramble on - I'm a bitter, cynical, old man - I'll stop rambling sometime after they exorcise my ghost to the Outer Darkness. Maybe quite some time after.
So, brace yourselves....
I pulled this bit to the top because it's part of a very important aspect of cooperative games: while mere fairness is quite sufficient for competitive games, and can be readily achieved by giving each player equal access to all choices, the more difficult standard of /balance/ is more important in cooperative games. Because slipping in a trap choice to create an enhanced contrast between a naive player and a system master doesnt rewardvthe sysyem master or punish the bad choice - it punishes the whole group. And, because the joy and accomplishment of succeeding in a cooperative game doesn't come from being mvp or blandly participating as a warm body, or even having your own spotlight moment, but from cooperating and being fully contributing.
D&D was designed as a wargame, and wargames were traditionally competitive, but it turned out becoming the first RPG, and, increasingly, being played more like a cooperative game.
It did /try/. 'Niche Protection' was such an attempt make an otherwise lowly, minor, infrequent, or non-cooperative contribution, make it critical, and make it exclusive. Did not work well.
Fighters just faught, clerics healed, thieves scouted for traps & enemies. Problem was, two of those were repetitive, and one was solitary, and they were far from comparably weighted.
But, they prevailed for a quarter-century. And we got used to making the best of 'em.
WotC, for whatever reason - hubris at the success of M:tG, perhaps - though, tried. The 3.0 fighter didn't just fight, he protected, anchored the team, was the natural leader. The cleric was not just healing but flexible support. The thief, now Rogue, still scouted, but added meaningful damage in combat. The Barbarian, Druid, Ranger could step in to fill similar functions.
The mechanics to back those ideas up, though: the fighter got nothing to protect or lead; the cleric got a variety of good spells and could prep them, then heal spontaneously, the intent may have been to heal a lot, but the result was CoDzilla; the Rogue still had niche-protected trapfinding, but it's damage contribution got very situational, indeed, and it's BAB didn't support it well at high level.
But it was an attempt. It wasn't balanced, but it actually gave you a lot to work with, especially working with system mastery, which was fair enough. In fact it worked very well in competitive mode: PvP worked better than in any other edition, because fair is all you need in a competition, imbalanced choices just add a dimension of skill.
To run it as a cooperative game was not an insurmountable challenge, though, that's what E6 let you do, that's actually what the Class Tiers were about, assemble a party within a tier or two and you'd have a more balanced party, and, of course, it wasn't /that/ different, so much of what worked before could be made to, again.
So, 3.5 received a lot if complaints about balance, but it was a great competitive game because of those 'problems,' worked well as a game of competitors cooperating for survival, and could be run more cooperatively with some work.
WotC took all those complaints too seriously when designing 4e. The result was a solid cooperative RPG, with defined roles based on the originals. The fighter had mechanical support for it's tradition of protecting the rest of the party, the cleric's healing duties were no longer onerous, and the Rogue was a stand-out damage contributor. All reasonably balanced. Pretty awful for PvP unless you pitted parties against eachother, and had lots of time to kill. Also not wonderful for the old-school competing allies of necessity, nor compatible with all the little tricks that had banged the game into cooperative shape for decades.
So, 5e rewound most of that, and D&D is D&D, again.
If it's a competitive game, sure. Starting at different capabilities and advancing at different rates just gives you a variety if possible strategies to achieve victory.
But, for a cooperative game, it's awful: some players are dead weight, some are marginalized, others dominate - that it can shift over a long campaign is hardly helpful...
But, if it's cooperation among rivals, it's back to strategy, and, at times, rather odd ones.
LFQW is not exactly the same issue as 5MWD.
You could have asymmetric resources, but linear advancement across the board. Imagine a version of D&D where the fighter hits stuff at 1st, and gets slowly better at hitting stuff as he levels, and the MU at 1st, casts Sleep 1/day, and, as he levels, is able to affect more and more HD of subjects with that 1 sleep spell.
Resource asymmetry, one is at-will, the other daily, but no "Q" it'd be LFLW.
Part of it, it removes the issue of class imbalance from the 5MWD, pacing becomes a consideration only in encounter challenge. So, a cooperative game could use a strategy like the 5MWD, or, conversely, time pressure and long days, and remain functional as such, with everyone still contributing in their role & class's different ways.
...hey, I said I was gonna ramble...
That sounds plausible, not that I think new-to-gaming players are a realistic target audience for any RPG that isn't the current, official version of D&D.
