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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8743837" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that there are a lot of bad takes on the problem that often show a lack of historical perspective, or a failure to understand what rules changes have really impacted how the game plays.And I think that in a lot of ways, this discussion is resembling the fetishization of "realism" in the 1980s were faced with certain table difficulties there was reliably always someone who would suggest that whatever the problem is the answer was more "realism".   People have these pet theories that they are currently nursing as "the answer" but I often get the impression they really haven't played tested the theories or done any math and theory crafting.  We're stuck in a small set of paradigms about what is the answer based solely on what people have seen tried or what felt like it was working for them.All of those answers are just wrong, or at best they are misleading because they are such a tiny portion of the problem.And for someone like [USER=82524]@Vaalingrade[/USER] it's increasingly obvious that his real problem isn't mechanical balance but "cool balance".   His complaints about how the system works and what he thinks would fix it are focused on players having "shining moments of awesome" regardless of whether in fact those moments are anything more than reskinning things that are largely already available to martial classes.  What would make Vaalingrade happy I think more than anything is bigger grander cinematic moves that he can readily imagine and which give the character a moment of awesome he can concretely imagine.  And really, I'm all for that, I just think he can get that without even touching the problem of balance.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that he needs to get that without touching the problem of balance, because it's not in fact a balance issue and if we up the damage output fighters or any other martial class is doing we'll negatively impact combat as challenge.  But yes, I agree with him that the sort of things he describes ought to totally be the sort of thing that fighters can do.  But keep in mind that this in many ways means Vaalingrade isn't up against casters in some sort of balance tradeoff.  The real thing that is attacking Vaalingrade's desired aesthetic of play is the desire to streamline and speed combat, which in turn takes away the simulationist process of play that builds up these concrete visual pictures of the awesome thing his character is doing.</blockquote>

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