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I don't think this is necessarily a dichotomy. Alignment can be a general outlook and guide for roleplaying, and still occasionally interact with the rules. This allows for situations where the character's heart or purity are weighed, which are a staple of fairy tales and folklore. If you wanted...

Who says magic is the fifth force? Who says there are four other forces? Who says gravity is a force and not, say, a centripetal property shared by the elements of earth and water but not fire and air? Who says a human nervous system works with electromagnetism rather than, say, qi? I agree...

Are we still in an era where we need to be reassured four times that the cool kids are not going to make fun of us roleplayers? The Disney-Pixar colossus, grand arbiter of mainstream social acceptability, just released a two-hour love-letter to Dungeons & Dragons starring Tom Holland and Chris...

I guess I don't understand what you're getting at, then. I don't think anyone here would disagree with this argument. Even a hardcore moral absolutist is going to acknowledge that people in fact have different opinions about what good is due to their individual perspectives and biases -- humans...

In an undergraduate philosophy course, this is an interesting question. In D&D, we are fortunate enough to already have a participant who is in a privileged position with regards to defining the world and its rules, so we can just answer, "it's the DM's good", and get on with playing.

You're mixing the properties of the fictional level with the nonfictional level. The subjectivity of "good" in nonfictional reality (which is debatable, but let's grant it for the sake of argument) does not bear on its objectivity in the fiction. That would be like saying that dragons are...

Yes, I'm aware. Even if I hadn't gotten it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, it's pretty obvious.

If you say so. :unsure: Which does not answer my question about why fireball in particular is overpowered.

Sure. As you said, it states that "The World Is Magical" on p. 9 of the DMG. And then the very next sentence begins, "Practitioners of magic are relatively few in number". And then the suggested alternate assumptions in the following section present "Magic Is Everywhere" as a contrast to this...

... We're just gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.

I have a hard time believing that specific complex monster behavior is a part of the base balance assumptions of the game. At the very least, if it were, I would expect to see it laid out somewhere in the MM or DMG explicitly.

...for some campaign worlds.

My first thought was something like that, but it doesn't scale cleanly when you upcast the spell. Counting the ones and sixes is level-neutral.

That's how you get power creep. Any damage spell at 3rd level (and even higher) currently has to measure up to this spell that is deliberately and explicitly overpowered, dealing 33% more damage than the DMG guidelines say it should. If fireball did not exist, I'd wager, you would not be saying...

Our world has high-explosive artillery shells, but that doesn't mean every street criminal is going to expect or tactically account for them.

I recently put monk levels on a baleen whale.

Outdoors, do you have to cast the fireball so it bursts 20 feet above the ground?

You have put your finger on the problem precisely.

A more conservative alternative might be to say it's just +5 feet if there are more 6s than 1s and -5 feet if vice versa. That would give the border some uncertainty without being so hugely swingy.

I guess I just don't have a lot of sympathy for a wizard who deploys the arcane equivalent of cluster munitions anywhere near civilians. In real life, we have a term for people like that, and it ain't "hero".