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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5834849" data-attributes="member: 22779">Going back to the balance discussion and trying to ignore the low grade edition war going on here.  :/On the idea of homogenous classes:  There's a major issue here that is being ignored.  D&D is a classed system.  That means any given class is identical to itself.  Does that mean that you can only make 9 characters in 3e D&D?  Of course not.  Two fighters, even though they have identical mechanics, can be very different.  Heck, even two AD&D paladins, with extremely restrictive mechanics, can still be very, very different.Unique mechanics do not result in unique characters.  All they do is make it very complicated to balance one character with the next.  It means that everyone at the table is actually playing a different game.  The casters are playing a fundamentally different game than the non-casters.  The skill guy is playing a fundamentally different game from the combat guy.And, because we insist on balancing like with unlike, those fundamentally different games are delineated by class.  If you play a fighter, you are playing the combat guy because you don't have access to the caster mechanics, and you have very limited access to the skill mechanics.  If you're playing the rogue, you don't have access to the caster mechanics and you're sucking hind mammary when it comes to combat (depending on edition, you might be sucking pretty hard).  The casters break all the walls because, while they get minor access to the combat mechanics, the exceptions built into the caster mechanics allow them to excel in the other areas if they choose.Unique mechanics result in tiered classes.  You simply cannot build a balanced system, where no given option is clearly better than other options, when you have a slew of distinct systems kludged together.  A high level caster is demonstrably better in all ways than a non-caster.  That's what a tiered class system means.  And, for a while, that was considered a feature - the magic user starts weak and then achieves cosmic power.I'm not sure that that is really a feature anymore.</blockquote>

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