NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7030253" data-attributes="member: 996">D&Ders were pretty active on UseNet, and, before that on BBSs, including MUDs for instance.  The earlier community, though, was certainly connecting through 'zines in the 70s, and The Dragon (and other mags like White Dwarf) through the 80s (and into the 90s), alongside evolving digital media as time marched on. I don't see how that's a pendulum swing.  In the classic game, there were numerous mechanisms implemented for the sake of balance, that largely didn't work.  People got used to the game being imbalanced, and the DM compensating.  In 3.x, there were intentional 'rewards for system mastery' (which is imbalance, if imbalance meant to increase the appeal of the game to certain styles) built into the game, and empowerment shifted to the players who came to revere The RAW, and, with systemic imbalance baked in and fewer tools to cope, people started noticing all that imbalance (and the old imbalances that were still left over).  The pendulum then swung over to designed-in balance in 4e, and with 5e has swung back to more (casual? natural language? half-baked? Ikea-like unfinished? IDK) open design empowering DMs and making balance a low priority. If you simply don't want to run a balanced game, I can understand the sentiment.  Though, I think you underestimate the ease with which even the best-balanced games can be willfully imbalanced.  For instance, in the classic game, casters start with few Vancian spells, that baloon in number until they utterly dominate, while non-casters get no resources other than hps.  Simply heaping more spells on casters and stripping non- casters of any toys they may have at higher level gets you right back there.   A critical component of said foundation, then.Ironically, that gets into a different flavor of imbalance.  A game without choice is as imbalanced as a game with many choices, one of which is vastly superior to the others.  Stable, more than perfect, I think, is the point of the foundation in this metaphor.</blockquote>

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