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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 5784180" data-attributes="member: 2804">Excellent post, malkav! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I generally agree with your analysis of balance vs. uniformity. When 4e first came out I embraced it whole-heartedly. Got somewhat burned out by the uniformity after playing it for two years and decided to change things up a bit by playing Pathfinder for the past year.Playing Pathfinder and going back to a 3.x baseline gave me a whole new appreciation for 4e and I fell in love with it all over again. To me, the uniformity in class structure is a drawback I've made peace with and am willing to live with in exchange for class power parity and all the other things I prefer about 4e over 3e such as more heroic starting PCs, no save or die, at-wills for mages etc and so on. I do think you could make a 5e that balances classes without uniformity. In fact, I think the design effort and knowledge that came from 4e can help in that regard. WotC should now have a pretty good understanding how to balance classes against each other, how conditions and movement balance against damage output and so on. So if 5e does turn out to be the ultimate edition we all want to play, I think even 3e fans have to grudgingly admit that 4e made it possible. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />So WotC should now be able to design a 5e that can take this knowledge and give us classes that feel different and even use different subsystems entirely but are still balanced against each other without resorting to uniformity. That is my hope for 5e.And I also hope that they make this calculus transparent and include it in the DMG so that gamers and DMs can better tweak and customize their game and have a good idea of the mathematical impact. For example, I prefer at-will wizards to the daily casting model. But if the game included a way to calculate how to trade the power of a per day spell slot for one you could use at-will, then I think that makes for a better game for everyone and allows the pro-Vancians to live in peace with the anti-Vancians. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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