D&D (2024) DMG 5.5 - the return of bespoke magical items?

Why should the Fighter have to work harder to make the experience good? Shouldn't every class have an equal degree of expectation of having to work to get a good experience out of it?
I take the exact same approach when playing a caster: I'll find a way to make it fun.

And these days most of my stable of characters are casters, and high-end ones at that. As fate would have it, though, the two I have in the field right now (one in each of two active parties) are a straight Fighter and a straight Thief; and in a 1e-like game if there's going to be a mechanically-disadvantaged character it's the Thief.

I make her fun to play as well. :)
 

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The starting point ever since about 1974 has been to build on-with-around that which came before.
Er...no, not really. 3e did away with essentially everything mechanical that preceded it. 4e did away with nearly everything mechanical that preceded it. 5e sutured together stuff that came before it, but very much with a completely different spin.

The mechanics have not been one contiguous thing for ages. At absolute most, you could argue that the most barebones mechanic of all, the d20, is the one and only thing that's lingered...and even then, it only really took that level of prominence with 3e. Before 3e, plenty of very, very important things were resolved by d6 or d100 or a variety of other methods, meaning resolution mechanics were all over the place.

How so? From my viewpoint 4e and 5e share a lot more similarities than differences; in design philosophy, intent, and intended playstyle if maybe not in precise mechanics.
From my viewpoint, they only share a very few points of similarity, and 5e actively worked to destroy as much of 4e's legacy within it as the designers could humanly get away with. I mean that very, very sincerely. 5e is ashamed of its 4e roots, covers them up whenever it can, and works as hard as possible to really be "3e mark IV, we'll get it right this time, we promise."

For many, being able to admit when trial and error has come up "error" is the hard part.
Uh...

If that's the "hard" part, then what on earth is the appropriate adjective for describing how difficult it is to create a structure that is actually mathematically sound, while also actually interesting to use, and flexible enough to account for a reasonable diversity of choices?

Because that part sure as hell ain't easier than admitting you didn't do it right.

Designing things at all is hard. Once you've got over that hump, "well" and "poorly" take IME about the same amount of effort. :)
I'm sorry, I just...I can't engage in any constructive way with this belief. "Painting at all is hard, once you get over that, it's as easy to paint like Leonardo as it is to paint like a five year old." No. Just...no. That is simply not true, and never will be.

I'll caveat that, however, by saying "well" does not by any means equal "perfect", 'cause we ain't gonna get that on any scale larger than a single DM designing for a single consistent and known-well group.
Perfection is never the goal. Achieving the design goal within a reasonable statistical range is the goal. You set what you consider the range of reasonable success (e.g., "the damage output of a damage-focused Xth level monster should be within +/-10% of average output of (X-1)th to (X+1th) monsters" or the like), and then test and iterate until you achieve this. It's a long, slow, and often boring process as a designer, and requires extensive testing. That's one major part of why it's so hard for individual DMs to replicate. Getting enough testing data as a singular DM is extremely difficult. Designers can tap dozens, hundreds, potentially even thousands of groups to get much, much more data, which makes the mathematical structure far easier to test.

And if, after (say) a couple months of doing this, you find that you genuinely can't get within that range, you go back to the drawing board to find out why your reasonable design goals aren't reachable. Perhaps you were actually unreasonable and didn't know it. Perhaps you missed something that's messing things up. Perhaps you failed to account for the actual degree of variability, and +/-20% should've been used. There are myriad ways why your design might fail to meet the goal you set for it.

Agreed to the latter: everything being identical isn't the goal. That said, balance isn't the holy grail of game design and treating it as if it is means all the other factors - playability, long-term engagement, short-term appeal, relative simplicity or complexity, fun, etc. - get given short shrift.
....balance is what enables all of those things, other than maybe short-term appeal.

An unbalanced thing becomes less playable, because it has degenerate solutions and unexpected failure points (such as the "ghoul surprise" that caught 5e's own designers off-guard during a demonstration that was supposed to show off how fun it was to play 5e.) An unbalanced system reduces long-term engagement, either because it can be solved, or because it defeats skillful play too often with random bull$#!t. Balance is how you make things that are simple but still provably effective, and other things that are complex but still worthwhile.

"Fun" is a useless standard. A game that genuinely cannot, even in principle, be enjoyable to play doesn't exist. If it did, it would be a powerful and extremely dangerous psychological torture tool. Now, that doesn't mean you should not be checking that the goals you've set are in fact enjoyable for the people you're wanting to sell the game to. That's very important! But getting those goals to be actually fun--to have something where prediction is possible but never certain, where there are many different valid strategies but no clear winning (aka degenerate) strategies, where doing the thing the rules indicate is a worthy experience people will seek out--then pursuing balance IS trying to make that happen.

Unbalanced systems have short-term appeal for the same reason puzzles have short-term appeal, because they are effectively identical: "Find the solution." Once you find the solution, the puzzle is done. There is no more enjoyment to be had. Maybe you hang the completed puzzle in a frame or something to look at later, but that's really not solving the puzzle anymore.

Balance is just one factor among many, and there's many different ways of both defining and achieving it.
But balance is either one of the best, or is the only, way to achieve many of those things. You are correct, however, that definition and method both admit a lot of variety! That's another huge part of why game design is so difficult. Being able to wisely pick design goals, to set meaningful standards for whether they've been met, and correctly interpret what the data is telling you when you get it--all of these things are hard. You are an engineer.

The problem IMO isn't that martials are too weak, it's that casters have been made too strong by the slow steady removal of all the restrictions they used to have in the BX-1e era.
I mean, I don't completely disagree with you there. BX/1e still had stupidly powerful max-level casters; 5e didn't invent wish, after all.

The bigger problem is that a lot of those limitations, restrictions, and complications that early-edition casters had weren't enjoyable difficulty. Difficulty, like balance, comes in a lot of forms--and, unfortunately, just like balance, most of the easy forms of difficulty are crappy. TVtropes has a term for this, "Fake Difficulty," and the page has some lovely examples of the concept. First listed one applies to platforming games. Having a difficult jump that requires precise timing and coordination is perfectly fine. Having a jump that is merely difficult because the camera switches orientations halfway through, so you have to suddenly shift which direction you're "pointing" or else instantly fail? That's fake difficulty.

This doesn't mean that these things couldn't have been reworked into legitimate challenge rather than BS. They probably could have. But the designers (again...) took the easy route and just axed them. They then did not

Playing a caster, particularly in combat, IMO should be a mix of great satisfaction when your spells work and immense frustration when they don't; with "don't" happening a fair percentage of the time unless the caster is very cautious, and with unpredictable consequences following. In other words: high risk, high reward. 1e got this right other than not having potentially unpredictable consequences.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing just isn't enjoyable for most players. Remember your standard of "fun" earlier? Your goal is not a badly-chosen one....except in the sense that it just isn't fun for most of the people who play. So where does that leave you? Are you going to do the thing you said was unacceptable, and limit your audience not just a little bit but very sharply? Or will you return to the drawing board and find a different approach that would be fun for more players?

Note that I am not saying there shouldn't be challenge. There has to be, that's part of what makes fun. But challenge is like bittering a beer. If you hop it too much, it drowns out the maltiness, the residual sugars, the aromatics from the malt roasting process, and the subtle flavor compounds produced by the yeast. Yet if you don't hop enough, the beer will taste cloyingly sweet. Just the right amount of bitterness is required...or, one might say, a balance of bitterness and sweetness.

Balance is what allows the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, whether it be in brewing or in game design.

What if I don't care how they fall as long as they all end up in the box instead of one or two ending up on the floor? I ask because in this analogy I suspect their all being in the box would be good enough for me, with further fine-tuning not required.
I mean, you can care or not care as you like. I am purely and exclusively using this as a physical demonstration of the general principle: balance is rare, it does not happen unless it is created, and other than obviously trivial cases, it is always--I repeat, ALWAYS--harder to create balance than it is to create unbalance. ("Extremely trivial" being things like "there is literally only one option". Trivial in the mathematical sense.) Unbalanced arrangements of objects have infinitely more infinite variety. Just throw the items in however you like, and you are essentially guaranteed to have an unbalanced setup. Conversely, starting from an unbalanced setup, there may not even be a way to balance it at all! Even if there is, it may be extremely un-obvious, even in this physical metaphor. Move it into the space of abstractions and ideas, and the difficulty increases tenfold.

No.

Do I think that when converted to game design, even trying to achieve that sort of spatial symmetry is overkill? Yes.

No.

Must all, or even most, chaos and disorder be designed out of an RPG? Again no.
Okay so you basically did the same thing for a second and third time here, and it's really, really annoying. I would really appreciate it if you stopped.

That is, you are turning something which I have explicitly called, and which very obviously was, an example and metaphor for a generic principle, and distorted it into a COMPLETELY unrelated claim, as though I had made those claims myself. Please stop doing this. I gave the clear, specific questions I did because they were examples of the general principle: It is always more difficult to set up a balanced structure than it is to set up an unbalanced one, outside of the cases you and I both agree are (a) trivial, (b) pointless, and (c) bad.

An unbalanced system is one where chaos rules. A balanced system that includes probabilistic elements, such as dice, is one that necessarily has uncertainty. I've never once said otherwise. Putting perfectionistic goals in my mouth is bad argumentation; it's you creating a strawman out of my position and then pretending you've beaten it.

So I will focus on your answers: You agree that spatial symmetry (one example of balance) is difficult to create and easy to disrupt. You agree that a random assemblage is almost never an orderly structure, and that in order to get an orderly structure, we must exert effort to create it.

The exact same principle applies to rules. In order to get rules that WORK, that do the job for which they were designed, you have to put in work! A lot of frequently very hard and boring work.

I agree that balance that offers no choice at all is pointless. I also agree that balance that offers merely an illusory choice is pointless.
Good. I've never said otherwise and have repeatedly and explicitly said both of these things (albeit in different words, usually too many) on many occasions.

But balance can and does take many forms. In post elsewhere I've outlined some of them: short-term balance, long-term balance, party-vs-opposition balance, character-vs-character balance, spotlight balance*, wealth balance, etc.
I mostly reject spotlight balance as an awful and pernicious thing, so I won't directly address that here. Other than that, I certainly agree that there are many different elements in play, which make the process of design more difficult! That, again, is why I say game design is difficult. It is not some trivial task, unless you are okay with doing it in a pointlessly bad way--as you have seemingly agreed above.

Nailing down any one of these is almost certain to mess with some others; the trick is to not nail any of them down but instead get each of them vaguely in the ballpark and then stop trying.
No. The trick is to do the work to make them harmonize. It is not to give up, which is what you're explicitly advocating: "stop trying." No. Don't stop trying. Keep at it. Keep testing and iterating and, if necessary, re-evaluating. You will either learn that your goals weren't achievable (whether in general or just practically), or figure out how to achieve them.

* - by far the least important from a design perspective; spotlight balance will always sort itself out at the table no matter what the game says, and my preference is that the players are fighting for that spotlight like hungry dogs fighting for a piece of meat.
As noted above, I find the very concept of "spotlight balance" pernicious and dangerous. Making players fight over it is one of the best ways to create open hostility in groups and to create the very "casters and caddies" relationship you claim shouldn't be a thing.

Because, in the end, what "spotlight balance" does isn't getting everyone an equal share of the spotlight. Instead, it teaches players that the game they should actually be playing is "how to manipulate where the spotlight points, so it's always on me."

And that, that precise thing, is why casters are and remain a problem, even in 5e. Because they have both the most powerful tools, and the greatest ability to keep the spotlight pointing only at them.

Plus? Controlling where the spotlight points is metagaming. I don't recall if you personally dislike metagaming, but I know a lot of folks around here hate it rather passionately. Folks who dislike metagaming may want to re-evaluate whether they like spotlight balance.
 
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You shouldn't have to. That's my whole point.

The Wizard doesn't. Why should the Fighter?
I think EzekielRaiden that a lot of people just liked the way fighters and wizards worked in AD&D. Some of you didn't and thrilled at adding all the extra stuff they've added in recent years. Some of us do not. When you look at old school games (not retroclones), you still mostly see this approach. So I doubt there is a way to make everyone happy. They tried it with subclasses in 5e with mixed success in my view.

I really think most of the designers at WOTC agree with the modern mindset of gaming. They can't understand why many of us prefer the old mindset. I don't think the issue is solvable. You can't make a D&D for everyone. And right now it seems their focus is new players and not retaining old players. So when you really love an edition, you are probably done. Just stick with the one you have.
 

I think EzekielRaiden that a lot of people just liked the way fighters and wizards worked in AD&D. Some of you didn't and thrilled at adding all the extra stuff they've added in recent years. Some of us do not. When you look at old school games (not retroclones), you still mostly see this approach. So I doubt there is a way to make everyone happy. They tried it with subclasses in 5e with mixed success in my view.

I really think most of the designers at WOTC agree with the modern mindset of gaming. They can't understand why many of us prefer the old mindset. I don't think the issue is solvable. You can't make a D&D for everyone. And right now it seems their focus is new players and not retaining old players. So when you really love an edition, you are probably done. Just stick with the one you have.
I think we can do a lot better at making an actually big-tent D&D than the one currently on offer.

Certainly, some of the better 3PP has shown that there's a lot of room for improvement.
 

It is not the only way someone could play them. It is the only thing that the rules actually give benefit to.

I want the rules to make it beneficial--useful, engaging, exciting--to do other things as a martial character. To be the cunning tactician that exploits enemy weaknesses and acts as a massive force-multiplier for her allies. To be the invisible blade that cuts the thread of life silently and is then gone. To leverage the weight of historical knowledge (one of the most important components of a proper military education, e.g. attending a military academy) to outsmart and outwit his enemies. To be the mystic adept whose esoteries are combat, and whose combat is esoteric knowledge put to action.


I have no idea why what I'm saying would make you think that. Nor do I see how it is relevant to the discussion at hand. I feel like I'm missing something rather important, because this sounds like a serious and worthwhile topic of discussion. I just...I literally don't understand how this is in any way like what I've been talking about.
This is tiresome. Posts like 319 & 322 are the exact sort of self fulfilling prophecy fertilizing that forest of spiked trees I described players coming to the table with when I jumped into this back in 314. You've decided with so much fervor that there is only one possible way to play and can not imagine any other way of playing to the point that you even talk about those other ways of approaching the game as if they are some kind of deviant activity somehow forced upon the unlucky victims.

Unfortunately wotc has spent a decade listening hard to that mindset and done everything they could to serve up the calls to action that mindset makes rather than spending some time & effort acknowledging and mechanically supporting the idea that there are other ways to approach gameplay that don't carry a bunch of spiked trees to the table.
 

This is tiresome. Posts like 319 & 322 are the exact sort of self fulfilling prophecy fertilizing that forest of spiked trees I described players coming to the table with when I jumped into this back in 314. You've decided with so much fervor that there is only one possible way to play and can not imagine any other way of playing to the point that you even talk about those other ways of approaching the game as if they are some kind of deviant activity somehow forced upon the unlucky victims.

Unfortunately wotc has spent a decade listening hard to that mindset and done everything they could to serve up the calls to action that mindset makes rather than spending some time & effort acknowledging and mechanically supporting the idea that there are other ways to approach gameplay that don't carry a bunch of spiked trees to the table.
I explicitly asked you to explain that so I could try to respond. You chose not to do so. I don't understand what you mean by this stuff. I am genuinely, deeply confused as to what "forest of spiked trees" means. I have no idea whatsoever how this is related to what I was talking about.
 

I explicitly asked you to explain that so I could try to respond. You chose not to do so.
You did respond to @Lanefan in 319 & 322. In fact those two posts alone reinforced my original statement with clear concise & to the point examples of how players do it.

I don't understand what you mean by this stuff. I am genuinely, deeply confused as to what "forest of spiked trees" means. I have no idea whatsoever how this is related to what I was talking about.

I linked to it originally, Tree spiking is the process of going into a tree plantation & driving something hard (metal/ceramic) into a tree with the goal of causing a logger's chainsaw chain to break when it hits the object. It's very difficult to detect until a logger's chainsaw hits the spike. A player coming to the table so certain that they will be a powerless "caddy" to a caster that they dismiss any efforts to help them as you did in 319 & 322 is going to function just as those spiked trees when the chain of gameplay crashes into their self inflicted pessimism and produces a fail state where the PC does nothing rather than the expected harvest of the PC doing stuff and the player having fun.

"Tree plantation" is just the name for what is basically a modern day farm for trees. Someone with land plants a bunch of trees & lets them grow for years till it's time for a logging/lumber company to buy & harvest the trees.
 

But even if you have time skips and downtime, the characters aren’t spending that time crafting. You said it yourself: they have families, they have things to do.
all of it, no. But if we take all winter (4 months off) I see no reason we can't make an item or two by these rules. If we skip 5 years they could find the time to make legendary items?!?
 

Er...no, not really. 3e did away with essentially everything mechanical that preceded it. 4e did away with nearly everything mechanical that preceded it. 5e sutured together stuff that came before it, but very much with a completely different spin.
Only when you look within the D&D-verse.

3e, 4e, and 5e all took ideas from outside the D&D sphere and adopted/adapted them (or in some cases shoehorned them) into whatever version of D&D was being designed at the time.

Contrast with 3.5e, Essentials, and 5.2e, all of which are simply direct riffs off the system already in place at the time.
The mechanics have not been one contiguous thing for ages. At absolute most, you could argue that the most barebones mechanic of all, the d20, is the one and only thing that's lingered...and even then, it only really took that level of prominence with 3e. Before 3e, plenty of very, very important things were resolved by d6 or d100 or a variety of other methods, meaning resolution mechanics were all over the place.
That "all over the place" resolution is IMO far preferable to everything being on a d20 as it allows for more flexibility in design.

And the mechanics haven't been that "jumpy". A fair bit of what became 3e was run out in late-era 2e splatbooks*, and a fair bit of what became 4e was run out in late-era 3.5 splatbooks*, thus a group using all the splats would see the edition transitions as being much smoother than would groups using only the initial core books.

This follows TSR's lead: a lot of what would become 2e was run out in the late-era 1e splatbooks.

5e went a different (we can argue all day about whether better worse or the same) route, with the run-out period being replaced by public playtesting...which, given how little of substance got changed by said playtesting, really was just a run-out period under a different name.

* - and-or in adjacent games e.g. I believe one of the Star Wars RPGs contributed quite a bit to (4e?) design - memory's hazy on that one.
From my viewpoint, they only share a very few points of similarity, and 5e actively worked to destroy as much of 4e's legacy within it as the designers could humanly get away with. I mean that very, very sincerely. 5e is ashamed of its 4e roots, covers them up whenever it can, and works as hard as possible to really be "3e mark IV, we'll get it right this time, we promise."
4e was an unpopular edition in their eyes and so they papered over quite a bit of it. But the underlying playstyle expectations - short fast campaigns, quick level-ups, easy on the PCs (compared to 3e and earlier), grid-and-mini based, treasure and opponents neatly parcelled out, realism thrown out the window - didn't change a whit. And as my preferences tend toward none of those, from my viewpoint 4e and 5e look mighty similar.
I'm sorry, I just...I can't engage in any constructive way with this belief. "Painting at all is hard, once you get over that, it's as easy to paint like Leonardo as it is to paint like a five year old." No. Just...no. That is simply not true, and never will be.
Once you've learned how to paint halfway well (which is the hard part) you're then able to make your paintings look like Leonardo's or look like those of a five-year-old.
Perfection is never the goal. Achieving the design goal within a reasonable statistical range is the goal. You set what you consider the range of reasonable success (e.g., "the damage output of a damage-focused Xth level monster should be within +/-10% of average output of (X-1)th to (X+1th) monsters" or the like), and then test and iterate until you achieve this.
The minute you look at the math that closely you're already trying to hew far closer to perfection than IMO is necessary.
It's a long, slow, and often boring process as a designer, and requires extensive testing. That's one major part of why it's so hard for individual DMs to replicate. Getting enough testing data as a singular DM is extremely difficult. Designers can tap dozens, hundreds, potentially even thousands of groups to get much, much more data, which makes the mathematical structure far easier to test.

And if, after (say) a couple months of doing this, you find that you genuinely can't get within that range, you go back to the drawing board to find out why your reasonable design goals aren't reachable. Perhaps you were actually unreasonable and didn't know it. Perhaps you missed something that's messing things up. Perhaps you failed to account for the actual degree of variability, and +/-20% should've been used. There are myriad ways why your design might fail to meet the goal you set for it.
Better to mostly ignore the math other than in generalities. Fine-tuning it any further gives us 3e, with a stupid-steep power curve where both monsters and party needed to be within a very narrow level range to be viable threats to each other at the same time. 4e did kind of the same thing in a different way by giving everybody tons of hit points and thus making combats go on long enough that averages would take over. 5e tried expanding this idea to cover the adventuring day rather than a single combat.

In the end it's on the DM to realize that if a monster does 20 points damage on an average hit (e.g. its damage roll is d10 + 15) then throwing those monsters at PCs who still each on average have only 13 hit points is very likely a TPK. The designers' job is to present a wide enough range of monsters and other threats to viably challenge parties of any size, level, or composition and then let each DM decide what to do with said challenges and learn by trial and error.

For three editions they've tried helping DMs by adding things like CRs or XP budgets etc. and - going by the coverage in these forums - for three editions it hasn't helped anyone very much.
....balance is what enables all of those things, other than maybe short-term appeal.

An unbalanced thing becomes less playable, because it has degenerate solutions and unexpected failure points (such as the "ghoul surprise" that caught 5e's own designers off-guard during a demonstration that was supposed to show off how fun it was to play 5e.) An unbalanced system reduces long-term engagement, either because it can be solved, or because it defeats skillful play too often with random bull$#!t.
Balance can also mean each PC has an equal chance of getting knocked off. Randomness is a very good balancing mechanism.
Balance is how you make things that are simple but still provably effective, and other things that are complex but still worthwhile.
Which raises another aspect not yet touched on: simplicity vs complexity.

The more complex a design gets, the harder it is to make sure all the interactions work properly. All three WotC editions have IMO been way too complex, largely due to their focus on the character-build side of things rather than character-play.
Unbalanced systems have short-term appeal for the same reason puzzles have short-term appeal, because they are effectively identical: "Find the solution." Once you find the solution, the puzzle is done. There is no more enjoyment to be had. Maybe you hang the completed puzzle in a frame or something to look at later, but that's really not solving the puzzle anymore.
Magic the Gathering is a fairly unbalanced system and yet its appeal has remained steady for 30+ years now, largely because most of the time there isn't just one "solution". Every deck, no matter how well or poorly built, has strengths and weaknesses.
But balance is either one of the best, or is the only, way to achieve many of those things. You are correct, however, that definition and method both admit a lot of variety! That's another huge part of why game design is so difficult. Being able to wisely pick design goals, to set meaningful standards for whether they've been met, and correctly interpret what the data is telling you when you get it--all of these things are hard. You are an engineer.
Engineer, or artist?

I think that may be where we're fundamentally disagreeing here: you seem to see RPG design as an engineering challenge where I see it as more of an art form.
I mean, I don't completely disagree with you there. BX/1e still had stupidly powerful max-level casters; 5e didn't invent wish, after all.
Thing is, in BX-1e it wasn't expected or assumed that PCs would advance to the point of being able to hard-cast Wish or any of those other crazy-powerful spells. "Name level" (i.e. the point where the game kind of expected PCs to retire into non-adventuring activities) came at 9th; Wish doesn't come online until 18th.

I've been playing 1e or 1e-adjacent games forever and I've never seen a 15th-level PC (though I hear one of the current 14ths might be getting close). The highest I've ever played is 13th, the highest I've ever DMed is 12th; and yes the system does kinda fall apart beyond about 11th level unless the DM does a lot of kitbashing.
The bigger problem is that a lot of those limitations, restrictions, and complications that early-edition casters had weren't enjoyable difficulty.
Difficulty isn't supposed to be enjoyable. It's supposed to be frustrating, annoying, and unpleasant - that's why it's difficult.

And yes, occasional frustration IMO should be a design goal. Nothing should ever work perfectly every time and some things should only work a small percentage of the time...but be spectacular when they do work.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing just isn't enjoyable for most players. Remember your standard of "fun" earlier? Your goal is not a badly-chosen one....except in the sense that it just isn't fun for most of the people who play. So where does that leave you? Are you going to do the thing you said was unacceptable, and limit your audience not just a little bit but very sharply? Or will you return to the drawing board and find a different approach that would be fun for more players?

Note that I am not saying there shouldn't be challenge. There has to be, that's part of what makes fun. But challenge is like bittering a beer. If you hop it too much, it drowns out the maltiness, the residual sugars, the aromatics from the malt roasting process, and the subtle flavor compounds produced by the yeast. Yet if you don't hop enough, the beer will taste cloyingly sweet. Just the right amount of bitterness is required...or, one might say, a balance of bitterness and sweetness.
Side note: waving the hops at the brew from several feet away is all any beer needs IMO, says he who lives in the city where (arguably) the whole hops-uber-alles trend began.

There should be challenges. And with those challenges should come occasional "I win" buttons along with occasional "I lose" buttons.
An unbalanced system is one where chaos rules.
And yet, the most chaotic system of all - everything left to pure random chance - would also be in near-perfect balance other than in the very short term.
So I will focus on your answers: You agree that spatial symmetry (one example of balance) is difficult to create and easy to disrupt. You agree that a random assemblage is almost never an orderly structure, and that in order to get an orderly structure, we must exert effort to create it.
A random assemblage is almost never an orderly structure - agreed. My point is that provided all the pieces are present, a random assemblage is almost good enough as it sits and any but the most basic attempts to enforce order on it (e.g. shaking the box to settle the pieces) is highly likely to be wasted effort.
The exact same principle applies to rules. In order to get rules that WORK, that do the job for which they were designed, you have to put in work! A lot of frequently very hard and boring work.
Meh - that's the engineer's approach again. Me, I'll just throw stuff at the wall and if it sticks, it's good. :)
mostly reject spotlight balance as an awful and pernicious thing, so I won't directly address that here. Other than that, I certainly agree that there are many different elements in play, which make the process of design more difficult! That, again, is why I say game design is difficult. It is not some trivial task, unless you are okay with doing it in a pointlessly bad way--as you have seemingly agreed above.
Question: have you ever tried to design a game yourself, or done major root-level kitbashing to an existing game to the point where the result is almost a new game?

I ask because I've done the latter, and it really ain't as hard as you're making it out to be.
As noted above, I find the very concept of "spotlight balance" pernicious and dangerous. Making players fight over it is one of the best ways to create open hostility in groups and to create the very "casters and caddies" relationship you claim shouldn't be a thing.

Because, in the end, what "spotlight balance" does isn't getting everyone an equal share of the spotlight. Instead, it teaches players that the game they should actually be playing is "how to manipulate where the spotlight points, so it's always on me."

And that, that precise thing, is why casters are and remain a problem, even in 5e. Because they have both the most powerful tools, and the greatest ability to keep the spotlight pointing only at them.
Heh - sounds like "challenge accepted" should I ever end up playing a Fighter in a 5e game. :)
Plus? Controlling where the spotlight points is metagaming. I don't recall if you personally dislike metagaming, but I know a lot of folks around here hate it rather passionately. Folks who dislike metagaming may want to re-evaluate whether they like spotlight balance.
I'm a strong opponent of metagaming but hadn't ever thought of spotlight control/balance as being such.
 

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