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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 5781247" data-attributes="member: 1465">Balance, at least intended as balance between players characters of the same experience*, is a good idea because it strives to make none of the character types inferior in the game.*note that same level does not equate to same experience in early editions, I personally prefer the 3e way that level progressions are identical but ultimately it doesn't have to be for the classes to be balancedActual characters can still be unbalanced with each other because of lucky/unlucky rolls in characters creation, but this has a much different magnitude of effects across the editions, and goes away if you don't use any rolls at all in the process.But indeed &quot;balance obsession&quot; doesn't sound good at all to me. If you don't stop at some point and accept that this balance is enough, ultimately the only fully_balanced game is the game where everyone plays the same character.I suppose everyone has a different &quot;enough balance&quot; threshold... but generally speaking balance works against character differentiation.Here's a quote from 1ed AD&amp;D PHB by Gygax: Trying to balance everything at any cost may give you a game where there is not much varied approach to different characters.This is especially evident when different classes traditionally had their &quot;spotlight&quot; in different moments of the game: exploration, combat or even downtime.One of my favourite features of D&amp;D 3.0 was that it felt different whenever I played a Wizard rather than a Fighter rather than a Rogue... playing each archetype almost felt like having different games to play! I had only short experiences at low levels with even older editions, but I suspect the differences were even greater. I really prefer to risk a moderately unbalanced game rather than give up diversity for comfortable balance.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 5781247, member: 1465"] Balance, at least intended as balance between players characters of the same experience*, is a good idea because it strives to make none of the character [I]types[/I] inferior in the game. *note that same level does not equate to same experience in early editions, I personally prefer the 3e way that level progressions are identical but ultimately it doesn't have to be for the classes to be balanced Actual characters can still be unbalanced with each other because of lucky/unlucky rolls in characters creation, but this has a much different magnitude of effects across the editions, and goes away if you don't use any rolls at all in the process. But indeed "balance obsession" doesn't sound good at all to me. If you don't stop at some point and accept that this balance is enough, ultimately the only fully_balanced game is the game where everyone plays the same character. I suppose everyone has a different "enough balance" threshold... but generally speaking balance works against character differentiation. Here's a quote from 1ed AD&D PHB by Gygax: Trying to balance everything at any cost may give you a game where there is not much varied approach to different characters. This is especially evident when different classes traditionally had their "spotlight" in different moments of the game: exploration, combat or even downtime. One of my favourite features of D&D 3.0 was that it [I]felt different[/I] whenever I played a Wizard rather than a Fighter rather than a Rogue... playing each archetype almost felt like having different games to play! I had only short experiences at low levels with even older editions, but I suspect the differences were even greater. I really prefer to risk a [I]moderately [/I]unbalanced game rather than give up diversity for comfortable balance. [/QUOTE]

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