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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8608906" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well then, while we agree on the result (Tasha's isn't broken, and Twilight Cleric is powerful but often overblown), there's gonna be some major gaps between you and a fair chunk of people today, including me.The way I see it, a class is kind of like choosing your game piece in Monopoly. That is, it is heavily an aesthetic choice, which should not unduly bias the game in your favor. Undue bias doesn't have to be as dramatic as "transforms the game into a one-man ego-trip," that's just the most blatant and obvious example.* It can be as simple as "class X always has better tools to solve problems, and as soon as those tools run out, that person--and the rest of the party--is best served by resting to regain those tools," aka the "five minute workday" or the like.More or less, I see classes (and races/ancestries) as your "game piece." Everyone deserves an equal opportunity to play the game. That means, even though those opportunities may be different in details, they should provide reasonably the same amount of ability to advance and reshape the state of play, which for TTRPGs means the state of the fiction (e.g. alliances, stakes, secrets, etc.) or the state of the mechanics (e.g. combat statistics, skill challenges, character resources, etc.) As a DM, I have necessarily a better and finer awareness of the fiction than the designers can ever have even in principle, and thus I prefer systems which either encourage every player to participate in fiction-building (e.g. DW, 13A), or which have a very light touch with fiction-building and instead focus on being a very good mechanical space (e.g. 4e, and sorta also 13A), leaving the fiction to me.As a result, either these things "should" be balanced so that everyone gets their fair shot at altering the fiction-state and the mechanics-state, or they "should" be balanced very well on the mechanics-state side of things so that I-as-DM can ensure that the group collectively (including me) develops a fiction we're interested in pursuing. The latter is mostly a thing because I can imagine up darn near anything, but developing well-balanced mechanics takes a lot of time and effort I just don't have. One person can tell an awesome, cohesive, compelling story. It's very hard for one person to create a system that is simultaneously deep, approachable, and well-balanced. Quality narrative doesn't require anywhere near the "testing" that quality mechanics do!*A friend of mine endured this in his first-ever 5e game (DM lavishing favors on someone, including 9th-lvl spells as a racial feature at 1st level!!), and it made him so infuriated and distraught, it inspired me to become a DM. Even with my intense impostor syndrome, I was absolutely certain I could not be anywhere near THAT bad as a DM. Turns out I'm pretty good at it, at least for my group, since the game has now been going for four years and that player has semi-recently returned from an IRL-induced hiatus!</blockquote>

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