Mach2.5 said:
That however, leads to specific balance issues in and of itself, regardless of the mechanics used. Classes, if they're going to be balanced at all, should be balanced at Low, Mid, and High levels. Its fairly impossible to balance every class at each and every level, but long term vs short term balance means that your preserver based wizard sucks at first, then gets better (and I don't want to play a class that sucks at all, especially if he ends up dying off before he 'gets anywhere') while your defiling based wizard is great at first, then begins to suck later on (in which case, I'd likely grow bored, upset, or frustrated that my once cool PC is now a piece 'o garbage).
Standard D&D3E: One wizard uses all his bonus feats for item creation feats; another uses them all for metamagic--supposedly, they're balanced. I'm just suggesting tying that dichotomy to the two types of magic in Dark Sun, and enforcing it--nothing more.
Think along this line: Would everyone want to play this class? Its overpowered if the answer is yes. Will no one want to play it? Its underpowered if the answer is no. Will people drop the class and begin multi-classing out of it once it starts to ebb off in power? Then its not well planned out balance wise.
As for your test questions: those only work if you have power-hungry players. The last D&D3E game i played, it didn't even occur to me to consider the balance of the various classes (it was also my first D&D3E game, so i didn't really have any data on their balance or lack thereof). I tried to find a class that fit my character concept (and eventually ended up switching a couple of skills since there wasn't any class that fit my concept). Even now that i know the weaknesses of monks, i'd still choose that for that character, if forced to use D&D3E core classes. And that's my general experience--i have yet to personally play with someone who chose or didn't choose a class because it was powerful/underpowered. They've all chosen their class (and race, and, to a slightly lesser extent, feats and skills) based on what sort of character they wanted to play. Heck, in my old house-ruled AD&D campaign, the classes were explicitly and blatantly out of balance: priests were clearly the most powerful class (though it depended to some degree on the deity), with the possible exception of Chosen [paladin replacement--sort of like the Champion in Arcana Unearthed]. And i didn't get a disproportionate number of people playing them--lots of people weren't interested in a devout/holy character, or didn't like the idea of having their morality beholden to a higher power. So, i suppose, you could say they *were* balanced, with the negatives in the RPing area offsetting the positives in the mechanical area.
I agree that, *if* you're dealing with a group of powergamers (or, actually, it's worst if you have a couple power gamers and a couple non-), then strict mechanical balance between the classes is necessary. I don't accept, however, that the rules therefore *must* abide by that one style of play in designing options and choosing balance. Moreover, while balancing setting (dis)ads against mechanical (dis)ads may not work for a pseudo-generic ruleset, within a specific setting, i think it may, even for the powergamers group.
Look even at the classes in the D&D PH: they are only really balanced in a specific style of play. If you decide to run a game of courtly intrigue, where violence is almost never an option, there are no physical threats, and casting spells on others is frowned upon, the D&D3[.5]E classes are horribly imbalanced. Nobody would play a fighter unless they *liked* to be a 2nd-stringer with very little to contribute. Or, unless that's what they wanted for flavor reasons. D&D3E, despite its handwaving to the contrary, has already decided that RPing is an element in the balance equation, by choosing which mechanical items have what value for balance purposes--specifically doing the calculation based on an adventuring/dungeon-delving combat-centric campaign style.
Dark Sun alters that basic premise slightly. This thus alters the relative values of character abilities somewhat (simple example: being an arcane spellcaster now has downsides, even if you change no rules). To claim that balance is an abstract and absolute quantity that exists outside of the playgroup, playstyle, and setting is demonstrably absurd.
(sorry, I had to say that). The rules will allow for a preserver in desperate need to defile (as was the case in the novels) and for defilers to turn a new leaf through druidic atonement (as from the old 2e DS).
