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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9284777" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That's not what you said.What you said, bolded for emphasis:Every RPG I've ever seen has understood that balance is actually quite important for making a game that is interesting to play--especially if that game offers multiple distinct pathways to victory meant to support distinctive playstyles. Players tend to get upset when, say, one specific method is simply universally better at dealing with problems, or when an expected and typical playstyle choice gets unfairly punished for bad, unjustified reasons. Even when it's a single-player game!You'll note, for example, that Baldur's Gate 3 did three critical things that deviate strongly from how 5e is designed, in order to make even a small dent in the extreme bias toward spellcasters being the dominant strategy of play:1. Weapon properties actually matter, rather a lot, and usually act to significantly enhance the damage or utility of anyone who isn't a full spellcaster.2. Absolutely showering the player with magic items, particularly weapons and armor, most of which are near-useless for full spellcasters, and many of which are no more nor less useful for part-casters like Paladins.3. Including all three primary spellcaster classes (wizard, cleric, druid) as recruitable allies, so even players who don't choose to play one of those classes still get access to all those goodies.If, for example, it was significantly worse to play through the game as a Fighter than any other class, you bet your hindquarters players would have been Extremely Upset. Just as, for example, players were Extremely Upset with the design of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you could get through essentially the entire game with a purely pacifist, stealth and conversation focused build....except for the mandatory boss fights that cannot, in any way, be skipped or avoided and which specifically prevent the vast majority of non-lethal options from having any impact at all. Eidos genuinely kicked a hornet's nest with that one.Balance is very important. The boogeyman folks love to bring up, the fictitious strawman of some kind of incredibly delicate, diamond-perfect system that produces an absolutely flawless result 110% of the time? Sure, that's unimportant, because it's never been important, and was never the point of balance. But balance is an extremely important tool in the designer's arsenal, and players do in fact tend to get upset when the balance fails, meaning, when degenerate solutions, dominant strategies, and/or perverse incentives start affecting gameplay.Because that's what a lack of balance is: you have degenerate solutions, dominant strategies, and/or perverse incentives that negatively impact gameplay. You either go back to the drawing board and incorporate these dominant strategies as expected parts of play (as, for example, Warframe did with bullet jumping--much to its credit, because bullet jumping is super fun), or you correct the faulty design that created this problem in the first place (as, for example, Helldivers has recently done, reducing the power of a handful of weapons that were too versatile for their damage output.)</blockquote>

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