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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6946943" data-attributes="member: 996">Outside of scorched-earth edition warring, that's no reason not to adapt something like them, if you're experience the same problems.The point isn't to defend the designers in that sense, it's pointing out that it's not a new problem, and not one that hasn't been addressed in the past.  As to the point of wanting the 5e designers to take a stab at it, well, Mike Mearls worked on 4e from the beginning, and he's been the top designer since Essentials, so, yeah, he's taken a stab at it. There's nothing subtle about it, and it's not a difference from most of D&D's history, just from the other two 'modern' eds, 3e & 4e, which were both much more player-focused.  5e is heavily DM focused, and 'balancing' player choices like classes is something the DM can worry about, or not, as fits his style and his group's tolerance of (or preference for) imbalance.It's much closer to 2e  than either 3e or 4e, in how it approaches player vs DM.  3e & 4e were both very player-focused editions, they each presented many player options that were carefully calibrated (4e to be balanced, 3e to reward system mastery) and players seemed to have an expectation of that, as well.  5e is intentionally DM-Empowering, presenting fewer and less clear player options that require more DM mediation to function (among other things) to foster that.  1e AD&D may well have been designed to be balanced, but it was designed with the expectations of the wargaming hobby as a foundation, and that included the expectation that it'd be endlessly tinkered with, scenario by scenario, which with the much greater importance of the DM relative to the often downright optional wargaming 'judge,' ended up being very 'DM Empowering,' more or less by accident.  5e is very similar in that sense, it's just intentional.  Nope.  I've played D&D since 1980, with a break from 96-99, so I have the most experience with 1e, followed by 3e, then 4e - even when I played 2e, I mostly ran it, and with variants that still resembled 1e in some ways, so it's a distant fourth place, Basic I only played for a matter of months, 0D&D only a game or two at conventions to see what it was like, the 'X' in B/X and the later BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia, not at all.  I think that about covers it.</blockquote>Myself, I consider 5E to chiefly be a descendant of 3E. An edition that finally fixes for good a large portion of the d20 niggles, in a way that 3.5 or PF never comes even close to.[/quote]IMHO, you're way off base.  While 5e has plenty of mechanical details adapted from 3e, and some (with the serial numbers filed off) from 4e, it's very much a successor to the 'Classic Game,' AD&D (and probably B/X/ECMI/RC, that I just don't see for want of a reference - fans of that 'second prong' of the classic game can chime in).  It's between 2e & 3e in the 'evolutionary scale,' a it were.  It does fix a couple of 3e foibles, like the problems with MCing caster classes, but only incidentally - in that specific case, as part of an optional sub-system.You say that like the two opinions are somehow contradictory.  4e achieved class balance far and away beyond anything D&D had even tried before, by radically re-designing classes from the ground up, so, excluding it from consideration, you're looking for really fairly minor differences among the more traditional takes.   Of those:  3e was intentionally designed to be imbalanced (to reward system mastery) above and beyond the inevitable imbalances in any complex system, so can't help but be the least-class-balanced D&D of all time. Even if 5e were designed with no regard to balance, it couldn't help but be better-balanced than 3e.   The original game, was, of course, 'primitive' in the non-prejorative sense, and 1e AD&D was still pretty experimental and done in the wargaming style (expecting many variants) so could hardly be expected to have robust balance, and 2e was little-changed in the base mechanics from 1e.  I don't know exactly what BECMI/RC was like, but it was largely compatible with the other classic eds, while exploring, towards the end, gods as PCs, so one can only expect balance got a little crazy.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  So, for the 5e 'Standard game' to be 'better balanced' than the classic editions is not exactly a high bar.  It may well be.  Then again, in some ways, it clearly lacks or mutes some of the tougher (and, yeah, more heavy-handed) old-school balancing factors, particularly restrictions on magic and resource limitations.In any case, it targets any attempted class balance around the 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest 'day.'That's not a terrible analogy.  Sugar can be really bad for you if you eat too much of it....Class balance was always a goal in the classic game, even back in 1e, EGG would go on about it at length.   But the game didn't come through with it, the DM had to ride heard like a wargamer 'judge' to make it happen.  The same remained true of 2e.  5e wasn't designed like an old-school wargame, though, it was designed to be DM Empowering and 'modular' (sorta), and that inevitably put balance (class & encounter) solidly in the DM's court.  You simply can't use mechanics to enforce balance when you have no idea which mechanics the DM might choose to use, ban, or mod.dom hailed as a successful design5e does provide the promised "crystal clear guidance" in the 6-8 encounter guideline.  That's exactly what you're complaining about, isn't it?Clearly there have been many games to which encounters/day is a matter of mechanical indifference, so, yes, they COULD have done so, and it's possible (I think, likely) that they chose not to (rather than tried and failed).It is kinda a 'proud nail' that way.  Most of 5e is pretty consistent about calling for DM judgement, from the most basic action resolution, on.  I have no idea why they reverted to the more hard-and-fast style in that instance.  Could just be a stylistic oversight.  Could be that they think it's a more important parameter than others...Nod.  Fine as far as it goes.There's very little in the presentation of 5e to give players that kind of expectation, in general.[/QUOTE]

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