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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5957437" data-attributes="member: 996">AEDU is not the only way I could imagine to balance D&D. As a matter of fact, it's not exactly what I'd prefer.   It's just the only way that's succeeded to date.  Now, if you could come up with another of these "any number of other ways" that hasn't already been tried and already failed, I'd be happy to entertain it.  I'd rather not see dailies, at all, since they mess with encounter balance.  But, with Vancian 'in,' 5e is stuck with dailies, and the only way to balance those dailies is something like AEDU, where everyone gets a comparable number of daily resources of comparable power.  False.  Giving each class the limitted-availabilty peak power of dailies /does/ allow any class to excel at any time - if the player thinks it's a good use of his character's resources.  Classes also excel situationally.  4e clearly tried to make powers less situation-dependent, but many of them still are.  A Cleric will excel against undead, especially those relatively uncommon undead that are vulnerable to readiant damage.  An archer-ranger will excel in a combat in which it is hard to come to grips with the enemy.  There are also areas where class balance in 4e just isn't that good and AEDU doesn't really apply.  A Rogue will be a better infiltrator than the fighter, every time, because the same effort to balance the classes wasn't made outside of combat.  FWTWTY.I'm not following the metaphor.  You're saying that AEDU isn't good for people who want to cheat.  That's true.  I don't see how that's a bad thing.Table Top Fantasy Role Playing Game.   There is not standard fictional account of how magic should work.  Magic is magical, it varies quite a lot.  If you look at the origins of magic, you find sociological or psychological phenomena like 'magical thinking' (a human tendency to see causation where there is none).  Magic is never irrational, but it is far from scientific.  Heck, the first sequel started changing the rules.  Yet it was a successful enough franchise.  Really, too, the worst one was when they decided to sci-fi-ize it and make the mystical immortals aliens. Risk and resource limits were the only ones you specified.  You represented the fighter as having a few little tricks, like disarming, that would be useless against many foes for reasons of realism, while the wizard would face some risk/resource limitations for his 'greater magics.'  You implied a fighter with few options, little power, and what options he did have being frequently obviated by factors outside his player's control; and a wizard with a great range and scope of power, limited only by resource- and risk- management issues under the control of the player.  As you have throughout this thread, you preface your demands with the sincere assurance that you want balance, then demand radical imbalance.  On the contrary, taking the wizard down to the level of the 3.5 fighter - having a small selection of unlimited-use abilities chosen slowly as he levels and subject to change only slowly via some sort of re-training mechanism - would give you a simple-to-design, complex-and-interesting-to-build, highly customizeable wizard that could be used to produce many balanced, unique individual characters.  Rather than every wizard and his apprentice being able to learn every decent spell in the book, prep the best of them, and keep others in wands for systematic use, or scrolls for occasional use, you'd have each wizard being a unique individual, defined by the spells he's mastered.  Magic would still be able to 'do anything,' just not each individual wizard. I can't evaluate these 'other ways' you keep hypothetically alluding to, only the things you actually come out and say.  So overpowered characters shouldn't just be a matter of class and build choices, but also the result of an in-game competition among the characters to get to their 'godly power' mcguffin first?  I think I'd rather have the "automation" (level advancement), but then I prefer D&D in the cooperative mode.  5e probably /should/ have modules to help re-tune the game for PvP or other competitive modes of play, as well."When it needs to happen" is a very narrativist idea, and one I'm OK with, as long as players have some say in when that is.  Dailies work in that respect, though they're clearly far from perfect.  I certainly wouldn't mind seeing dailies go from the game, entirely - but, again, Vancian casting has already been grandfathered in, so all those various 'other ways' you might balance D&D without dailies (so much easier and more elegant though they could well be) are out.That's your call.  If anyone quotes me, though, you'll still see the bits they quote - and they're likely to be the 'worst' parts...</blockquote>

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