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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6177485" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Every point that I made in that post still stands.  The designer noting that the game is "loosely balanced" in a FAQ is a far, far cry from your "The designers there pretty explicitly stated that they approached class  balance in vague terms and that it wasn't the be all end all of design."  And that isn't splitting hairs.  They aren't even in the same ballpark.  To be quite honest with you, 4e is "loosely balanced" as well.  4e had unshapely holes in its math at onset (since fixed), has various "in-role" classes that perform better than others at the primary role (while performing better at secondary roles), and has the same issue with feat disparity of power (and horrific synergies playing off of them) that 3.x has suffered from.  The idea of rigidity of 4e balance and homogenization is truly absurd to those who have played it a lot.  It codified.  It siloed.  It brought up the meek.  It nerfed the all-powerful.  It focused classes into combat roles.  It opened up non-combat conflict resolution to all classes.  Specifically, in the name of balance, 4e did 4 things that made for a better play experience for the people who enjoy it (of which 13th Age has 3 of them in its design framework):1 - It gave Fighters specifically (and Martial characters generally) a primary focus (Defender) and gave them amazingly fun tools to achieve that.  Fighters finally thoroughly dominate a battlefield and are a fun, interactive, tactically robust class.  13th Age has this.2 - It removed the utter dominance of spellcasters (specifically Generalist Wizards) in all arenas of conflict from the mid-upper levels onward to Epic levels.  It removed, leveled up, or siloed game-breaking spells while maintaining the thematic spirit of the Wizard and giving it new tools to perform a focused combat and out of combat role.  13th Age has this too.3 - It created Broad Skills which allow every class more things to do per trained skill investment.  Further, it has lots of siloed PC build tools (Backgrounds, Themes, Utility Powers, Skill Powers, Multi-class Feats, * Rituals, Martial Practices) that allow everyone equal access to game-changing resources to deploy in non-combat conflict resolution.  You can play Sherlock Holmes the Fighter with a Theme, a Background and the investment of a Feat and a Utility Power.  13th Age has this too.4 - * Ritual Casting (and Martial Practices) available to all classes.  This is a huge one.  Now any class has access to the big, game changing effects that were formally only available to spellcasters.  Also particularly awesome is that there is a very solid martial form of them as well in Martial Practices.  13th Age does not have this and this is my only concern for balance amongst classes as noted in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?339902-My-Review-of-13th-Age&p=6168536&viewfull=1#post6168536" target="_blank">my review of 13th Age.</a>  I note that combat is going to be a little more swingy than 4e but my only real concern for balance in that game lies in Ritual Casting being available solely to spellcasters.  I have no empirical evidence as of yet, but this is one of the great balancing efforts of 4e...one that enriched the game considerably and allowed for archetype diversity and spotlight sharing in non-combat challenges at an unprecedented level.However, as I said in my prior post, the monster math is tight and explicit as is the encounter budgeting.  The scaling of classes appears to be pretty uniform.  There are a few heavily narrative abilities (Utility Spells, Swashbuckle, Storyteller) that are intended to be unbounded/non-hard-coded.  However, throughout the book, the designers regularly speak to balance and the "balance-centric" reasons they did what they did, such as the aforementioned 2 above.  13th Age is not a swingy ruleset nor is it true that "the designers there pretty explicitly stated that they approached class  balance in vague terms and that it wasn't the be all end all of design." While somewhat arbitrarily chosen in their exact specificity in my post (just to display some rough math...which I actually thought was pretty charitable), I wholly endorse <a href="http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?PHPSESSID=g6v768b6jvqqdf6af0jrcnitn4&topic=5293" target="_blank">the tier system</a> and used the exact same reasoning in my 2 long-standing 3.x games during that era.  I also had a slew of houserules (including normalizing the Action Economy) and outcome-based math to hold things together from at 9th level onward.This last point here is not going to work out as support for your argument.  In fact, you couldn't have possibly picked a worse sports league to display your point.  Quite literally everything the NFL does is to achieve parity and competitive balance, engineering as much opportunity for playoff turnover from year to year as possible:- Hard salary cap and hard salary floor to bottleneck the teams' expenditure on rosters, mandating that big markets can't overspend and small markets can't underspend.- Yearly out of division scheduling set up so the best teams from the prior year have more (theoretical) difficult schedules than the teams that didn't make the playoffs.- The draft set up such that the teams that weren't competitive the prior year draft correspondingly high (with respect to their futility) and thus retain (theoretically) better collegiate prospects.- Compensatory picks in the draft for loss of free agents.The National Football League is the poster child, the exemplar, of professional sports leagues enforcing parity and competitive balance by design.</blockquote>

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