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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5876331" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't think anyone is saying "Let's have awful math, that would be real fun!"I think he's saying "If at some point we need to choose between math and these other goals, math looses. It is a lower priority."Personally, I think that's a well-aligned priority. Balanced math is only as good as the game it props up. It is not a goal in and of itself. It is a tool in service of something much more important than itself. If balanced math was all we needed, we'd be playing "Coin Flip" and never want for anything more.4e had an honest-to-goodness innovation with how it balanced the numbers, and, on many occasions, the 5e team has noted that this is something they want to keep (and I agree with them -- no sense in throwing that little trick out!). But 4e's fetish for balance caused it to commandeer the rest of the game and force it to line up and check that balance box before it could be used. This lead to some end results that clearly fail on those other goals Mearls espoused. No one is saying "Wow, unbalanced stuff was so great, lets try that again!" Instead, the statement is more like "Wow, 4e went a bit too far in making sure everything was balanced. It lost sight of the reason that we want balance in the first place. For 5e, lets make sure that we keep in mind the true masters that we're serving here, and not place the false idol of balance up on a pedestal like it is the most important thing in the world."Besides, even with 4e's balance fetish, it's not like twink builds don't exist. Stunlock and frostcheese are this e's CoDZilla and PunPun. It's not as if any game with enough complexity to stay interesting isn't going to have some bits that get abused. Chase around balance too long and you find yourself chasing your own tail.None of that means that the math is worthless. All that means is that the math is not everything.I get that it's still sacrelige to some 4e fans to say that perfect equivalence isn't a prerequisite for a damn fun game, but, well, it isn't. Balance can certainly improve a game, but if it was a prerequisite, D&D wouldn't have lasted 30-some years and garnered millions of fans before 4e imposed balance on it from on high. Yes, the math is very important. It is not as important as the rest of those goals. If it gets in the way of those other goals, it must be sacrificed. Very few people play a game just because it gets the math right (or else 4e's sales would be much higher).</blockquote>

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