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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6594653" data-attributes="member: 996">? Haven't heard that one before.  What do you mean by 'level unbalance?'  Surely not that characters of different levels aren't equal? Not really a flaw, just a edition-war-twisted vision of abstraction as a problem rather than a reality of TTRPGs.  But, 5e not only has hps, it has HD that provide between-combat healing, full healing overnight, and, well, plenty of 'dissociation' if that's something you want to obsess over.  It's not alone. While munchkinism gets kicked from player-empowering builds in 3.x, to DM-empowered magic item distribution & rulings in 5e, it's still there.  You can go full-bore Monty Haul in 5e, nothing's more munchkin than that. But, unlike 3.x, it's entirely in the hands of the DM, so you simply don't have to go there... but you /could/.  <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=";)" />The heal-bot cleric and beatstick fighter are back with a vengeance, yes, and the rogue's skill mastery is, perhaps, even a bit more niche-protected.  The other classes are fuzzier, since there are kinda a lot of 'em, now.  'Roles' aren't really a flaw, though.  The related 'flaw' that's back is that each class gets it's own distinct mechanics and niche-protected special abilities.  Everyone's 'best' at something - what that something is isn't always clear, or always all that much better, but you get a real sense of the classes being unique as a result.Not what I'd consider one of the game's old flaws.  Combat's didn't really start to slow down until 2e C&T, at the earliest - except, of course, for when the game bogged down due to rules arguments, particularly over spells, which is still a possibility in 5e, I suppose.  Rather, combats in 5e 'suffer' from issues they had in classic D&D - combats needing to be frequent but minor to slowly chip away at resources instead of present a more dramatic challenge.  That gives you the more exploration-focused classic dungeon crawl, punctuated by brief moments of action. 5e does go back to a DM-arbitrated spotlight approach to balance.  I'd count that as one of D&D's old flaws, because, well, it's only as good as the DM is willing to twist his campaign around to force balance on the players - which is bad either way, either badly imbalanced, or a twisted, messed up campaign.Indeed, it would be fair to say that class balance is D&D oldest, most persistent, and most severe flaw - and that 5e does not even stack up that well by D&D standards.  5e is clearly less broken than 3.5 with all it's late-edition bloat.  3.0 or early 3.5, it's not so obvious.    It's clearly and vastly inferior to 4e AEDU, as well as Essentials and post-E less robust designs.  5e maps pretty strongly to 2e in a number of ways, including some caps on spells and very high fighter DPR.  Whether that's 'better' than 1e, 0D&D or BECMI is questionable, though.  The farther back you go, the more heavily the game tended to be modified.And that's where the old 'flaw' turns around and becomes a retro 'feature.'  Players have not choice but to trust the DM to manage things so that they each get their time in the sun.  They can't just go off on build-tangents or make the items they need for some broken combo or other.  It's /all/ in the DM's hands.</blockquote>

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