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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5782759" data-attributes="member: 3400">These debates are always a little like watching a train wreck, in part, because so many people sling around so many extreme and ultimately goofy arguments.Is anybody saying all forms of class balance are bad? No. But how far is too far? What methods will people accept? I'd argue that 4e took things too far or used the wrong method given that WotC is already turning around on playtesting an edition that is intended to appeal to non-4e players as well as 4e players. So we should look at the 4e solution to healing the rift as suspect.On extreme casesThese tend to crop up in these discussions a lot. You're going to get them in rule systems in which you have choices. Take a look at GURPS and Champions. Characters are perfectly balanced right? They all start with exactly the same number of points. But characters are all built with lots of choices before the players, including the choice to build characters in completely opposite directions leaving them incredible unbalanced with each other. Why should we expect any edition of D&D that involves any meaningful choices in character building be any different? And yeah, you see it in 4e too despite efforts to blunt the effect. Differences may not be as pronounced as in 3e, I suppose, but you still see them.Extreme cases, the kinds you see with hard-nosed optimizers red line the system like drag racers red line engines. An engine that works perfectly fine for most applications won't work well for a drag racer. D&D is not a drag racing engine. It never has been and it probably shouldn't be one in its most common form. Let 3rd party publishers handle that sort of thing with alternative sub-systems published under an OGL. On the topic of the sensibility of starting a wizard with anything lower than a 20: you realize that the default method in 3x (and every edition prior to that, I believe) was to roll dice to get your scores. You didn't get to choose to have a 20 in your Intelligence. You had to get pretty lucky. Alternative methods of generating stats are house rules - they may be options listed in a DMG somewhere, but choosing to use them instead of the default assumption is in house-rule territory. Make that choice and your balance-favoring house rule starts to cause imbalance by making that 20 in Intelligence a common occurrence instead of a statistical rarity. Fortunately, point buy isn't even 4e's default stat generation method. That's a standard array. Admittedly, it's designed to give the optimizer an 18, but that's still lower than 20.On the Oberroni fallacyMan, if I had a nickel every time someone bandied that about. Using good DM judgment and advocating same isn't a use of the Oberroni fallacy. Making sure PCs don't get unbalancing gear before it's no longer unbalancing used to be part of the art of good DMing. That +6 stat booster? Most PCs won't be able to afford it, if using the published guidelines, until they're over 10th level anyway. So, is following the published guidelines using the Oberroni fallacy? I'm confused.If advocating good DMing and game management is somehow now a logical fallacy, D&D has come a long way and not in a good direction.Game Balance - or meta balanceWhether or not an edition of D&D is balanced depends an awful lot on how you expect an RPG to be balanced and not just mechanically. How should the game balance between being a simulation of a fantasy world and a game of manipulated pieces within a rule structure. How much should the game's rules define what can be done or how much help should they offer a DM trying to operationalize the actions his players want to take? There's always been some gamism in D&D rules, there has to be. But the balance has been shifting, particularly over the life of 3e, away from simulationism and toward gamism. And the effect has been a mixed bag. 3.5 nerfed a number of magical effects to promote a certain view of combat gamism that has reached its ultimate expression so far in 4e. 3.0's streamlining of spellcasting and initiative, gamist moves to be sure, reduced spellcaster vulnerability compared to martial classes. Taking all of a character's iterative attacks at one, also a gamist move, pushes the game into swingier combat resolution territory. The shift in the gamist direction have, as far as I can tell, only led to more and more of it in an attempt to fix the problems it has caused. Yet the gamist shift seems to include a limit to its appeal. If it didn't, I don't think we would be talking about 5e this early.With a more simulationist approach, it's OK for game balance to be a lot fuzzier. Magic should be magical and be functionally unlimited, not nerfed so it doesn't leave the fighter behind. Let the limitations fall on the caster attempting to wield it by making it harder on him even if means having mechanics that aren't as smooth or easy to use from a gamist perspective. It's OK for a fighter to not have the same bizarre things he can do that the wizard has, compared to fantasy literature, the D&D fighter is still holding his own with pretty awesome feats that you'll rarely even see Conan do.Personally, I come down on the side of simulationism way more than I come down on the gamist side. I'm OK with more imbalance between characters than people on the gamist side. I look at D&D as having evolved from wargames and aspiring to much more as a result. 4e, to me, is an evolutionary throwback in focus even if its mechanics have advanced further than earlier editions of D&D. In an RPG, the rules serve to provide a basis for the genre simulation in a reasonably fair manner. That's all I care for them to do and, as a result, don't mind a certain amount of imbalance that helps reinforce the genre.</blockquote>

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