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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9024628" data-attributes="member: 29398">In 1e D&D as written, some species (like classes) had minimum stat requirements.To get away from this - and as it's work we only ever had to do once - we just shifted the bell curves instead, so whatever you rolled could and would be adjusted to be in the same relative place on the bell curves of the species you ended up playing.Rough balance is worth trying to achieve, along the lines of close enough is good enough.  Fine-tuned balance isn't; and 3e and 4e both showed us that a finely (i.e. overly) balanced system is much less forgiving if-when things go out of balance - look no further for how poorly those editions handled parties where the character levels weren't all the same - even a 1-level variance could really throw things out of whack.I also don't care much about moment-to-moment or round-to-round balance.  If one character has the capability to blow this scene or even this whole adventure away and another character can blow the next one away, I'm fine with that.  If one character is blowing every scene away, though,there's a problem.Because all the other species in the game aren't Human.That's the point: the game was originally designed along the lines that Humans are supposed to be the species that can do a bit of everything, while the others are better than us at some things and worse than us at others.  I've never seen any good reason to change that foundation, even after in effect kitbashing and rewriting almost the entirety of 1e over the years.Er...yes it is: saying something can't happen heads off any problems - balance or otherwise - it might cause before they even have a chance to manifest.  And through 40-odd years of trial and error I've gained a little bit of wisdom when it comes to seeing problems on the horizon and stopping them before they get much closer.Still not perfect, though - my current game still has some deep-rooted (though fortunately fairly minor) design mistakes that I can't in good faith fix until I run out a whole new setting...which likely won't be for some time yet, if ever.Yes, and banning something up front is that ounce of prevention. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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