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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9740581" data-attributes="member: 6790260">But that isn't actually balance. Like even in a long-term sense, it's not actually balance.It's literally not long-term balance, because in the long term, things become more unbalanced than they were before.Instead, it is, at absolute best, temporary middle-term balance: a range of levels where the exponential wizard is comparable to the linear fighter, rather than painfully behind or ridiculously ahead.Long-term balance looks either like oscillation, where two things repeatedly crisscross one another and neither maintains a lead for long, or like convergence, where two things take different paths to reach the same result. Middle-term balance just means you have two things genuinely comparable over some range, and anywhere else, anything goes.It straight-up is not balanced to make one thing objectively horrible for the early run, comparable for a little while, and then objectively the best thing after that. Because all that does is teach players, "Optimize the early run so you can get nigh-infinite power. Keep trying until you get it, because once you get it, you'll be too powerful to lose."Keep in mind, I don't accept uniformity as balance. That's the lazy non-answer. True balance--asymmetrical balance, where different paths really are different, but they're still comparable across a broad range of play--is a difficult but extremely rewarding target to reach. Many, many games have achieved it. D&D is only special by its all-too-frequent stubborn refusal to even try to seek it.</blockquote>

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