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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5984941" data-attributes="member: 996">This is an interesting point.  A lot of the time, you hear people going on about how bad it was that 4e tried to balance the game, and how much more desirable 1e was because there wasn't all this attention to balance.  It's not quite right.  1e /tried/ very hard to be balanced, but it was still a new kind of game, and it already had 'baggage' from the original game that it stuck to.   It tried, but the balance it delivered was baroque and fragile where it succeeded at all, and more often, it simply failed outright.4e is better balanced than prior eds, but it's not because prior eds didn't try.  It's because prior eds failed.  True, Monte Cook came right out and said that 3.0 was designed to 'reward system mastery,' as an explanation of why it's balance was so poor, so maybe 3.0, specifically, was the one half-ed that actively avoided balance - even though that statement is at odds with those made running up to it's release.  :shrug:It's nice to consider it in the context of history, but the fact remains that 4e - as much as some folks hate it for their own reasons - took a design approach that successfully delivered fairly robust class balance across all levels for the first time.  As is so often the case, the solution was actually less complexity.  4e has fewer individual balancing mechanism that 1e did, because it's balanced from the ground up, from a unified structure.  It was a bold, elegant approach, and a remarkable success as far as that one element of game design went.  But, of course, a lot of people hate it.  Why is often hard to pin down.  There are many, often contradictory criticisms of 4e, making it seem, at times, as if the "h4ters" are just groping around for rationalizations for their hatred.  I don't believe it's quite that simple.  I think, at bottom, the criticism with a grain of truth to it, the one that's the foundation for all the others, is that "it's not D&D."Of course, it /is/ D&D, and any court would find that, since it's loaded with D&D IP, published by the owners of the D&D trademark, with that trademark plastered all over it.  But, heck, they even put the D&D trademark on Gamma World and on a series of board games.  That's just not the same thing as being the D&D you started with or the D&D you had the best times with.  A new ed of D&D /can/ evoke those old experiences, though, and 5e is on track to doing so.  In that sense, if it succeeds, it'll "be D&D" in the visceral, personal way 4e couldn't.  Of course, to do that, it won't be as well-balanced or 'elegant' as 4e was.  But it should still, like 1e, try to be just as balanced as it possibly can be given the unique demands and challenges of its market niche and baggage.</blockquote>

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