No, I can not understand the self harm in wanting to be something that exemplifies someones problems in real life.
If that's true, which I somewhat doubt, then you lack empathy and a basic ability to understand human psychology and that's unfortunate and pitiable, though not really blameworthy.
It's not "self-harm", it's game and it's fun, and you connect with what you connect with. Some people like elves because they're also tall and thin - are they self-harming? That's laughable thing to say. How short-sighted.
"Why not?", because Colin seems like one of those people willing to lie to your face just to get your money. A true politician.
LOL what? All that video did was make some people laugh, and some people tell him he was being a jerk for not playing along with his stated KS goal. There's nothing clever or intelligently manipulative in that video, if anything it's a bit puerile and obvious. It's not the work of a "charlatan" man, like that guy couldn't sell you snake oil, he couldn't trick you, he couldn't con you, because he's be too busy trying to make a bad joke out of it!
I would not care either way about the "balance" as that was never a thing before WotC.
It absolutely was a thing. It was thing designers even talked about quite a bit. They were just really, really bad at it for the most part. Some RPGs of the era (the late '80s and early '90s) were a hell of a lot better at it, I note. I mean, did you never read Sage Advice? It was a terrible column for bad judgements, but balance was frequently invoked as the reasoning for a lot of these bad judgements.
I think it is called Rule of Cool niw?
No, that's an entirely different thing - the rule of cool is ignoring whether something make sense, is balanced and a bunch of other stuff because it's cool.
We just called it throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks.
No. TSR designers frequently invoked balance. I daresay if I had the Handbooks to hand, we'd see balance invoked repeatedly to explain why certain kits were designed how they were. Hell, I'm pretty sure the Complete Paladin has a whole bit on how OP Paladins are and how you need to do X Y and Z to keep them under control or something like that.
There was no need for an apology, because any DM using anything "broken" in their game is at fault, not some random author that just sold you their own imagination.
That's not how TSR presented their work in the 1990s. It was presented as the work of skilled designers, not "some random author", and presented as professional and balanced. That it wasn't either of those things was something that generally only became obvious when you saw work that was. I'd actually say the Complete Elves is pretty professional in a lot of ways (thorough, detailed, relatively well-written), but it's just, like, hilariously fanboy-ish for elves in a way that none of the other race books are, and the balance is just not there.
