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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 5272280" data-attributes="member: 114">I think we probably draw the bar at what is a 'flaw' in game mechanics at different places - I think that a trick combination which allows someone to do 10000 damage is a flaw, but a whole lot of other stuff (including the nature of the issue under discussion) isn't a flaw in a game system but just a reflection of the flexibility of the system.From 3e onwards there has been an increasing desire to 'balance' stuff, but I wonder whether it is chasing after hobgoblins (in the literary sense!) as more and more rules and more and more special cases get introduced which in turn introduce new corner cases... and the illusion of a system as perfectly balanced as, say, chess (or perhaps Magic the Gathering?) becomes the standard to be desired in itself.Was there less mathematical balance in OD&D, BD&D, AD&D etc? Certainly. Was there less fun then? I don't think so; in fact some of my most fun times were playing all kinds of classes back in the 70's and early 80's, at all kind of levels. If the 15 minute workday was a real problem then you would have found it back then more than any other time - natural healing was sloooow and magical healing was much harder to come by, and wizards had fewer spells. It sounds like a classic recipe for 15 minute workday, but it still didn't happen back then.Cheers</blockquote>