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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9503392" data-attributes="member: 29398">The starting point ever since about 1974 has been to build on-with-around that which came before.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.For many, being able to admit when trial and error has come up "error" is the hard part.Designing things at all is hard.  Once you've got over that hump, "well" and "poorly" take IME about the same amount of effort. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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.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 just one factor among many, and there's many different ways of both defining and achieving it.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.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.Martials, on the other hand, are little energizer bunnies that reliably just keep on going.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.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.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.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.  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.* - 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.</blockquote>

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