Is D&D "in real life"? I honestly cannot believe you are making this argument.
You are making claims with no data at all to back them up, which can be further refuted by the limited data we have.
Your arguments have done much the same. "X was more fun in its game than Y was in its game" absolutely has
no data whatsoever to back it up, and can be refuted by what little data we actually have, including things like explicit statements from the developers themselves who recognized issues with how they implemented things.
We aren't getting anywhere by pointing fingers and making it personal.
No it isn't and not all the sandwiches cost the same at Subway.
BUT ALL CLASSES COST THE SAME IN D&D.
That's the point.
You have
one menu. Everyone pays
exactly the same amount to get something from that menu: one class (at least to start), one race, one background. Why should people who just happen to like wearing bathrobes and shouting weird words get great physical prowess
and tons of special extra bonus rewards while people who like chainmail and weapons and physical fitness get just great physical prowess and
nothing else?
D&D presents its options as commensurate. Nowhere--not one single place--will say that Wizards are just objectively more powerful than Fighters. If you can present even one single quote from the books that explicitly says this, I will gladly and instantly surrender. But you won't find one, because it doesn't exist. Instead, we have mountains of examples of the designers themselves talking about things like adding Concentration to the game because casters could achieve too much with their spells in prior editions...aka...
casters were overpowered and needed to be rebalanced.
Or, if we take a slightly wider scope, looking at things like the heartfelt appeal from Mr. Buhlman for people to give PF2e a chance, because the designers themselves had become painted into a corner, unable to fix any of the outstanding issues of the Pathfinder ruleset (all of which were inherited from 3e) without radical rules changes
because casters broke balance by being overpowered. Or the rise of the "Spheres" rules (Spheres of Power/Might), which are now supplements for both PF1e and 5e, which were specifically an effort to give fun and exciting options to non-spellcaster characters (Spheres of Might) while forcing spellcasters to become more focused and thematic rather than the sprawling morass that standard PF spellcasting was. (The PF1e version came first, then was adapted for 5e later.) And Spheres rules are
incredibly popular among PF1e fans--far and away the most requested alternate rules stuff for PF1e.
People like balance...when it serves a useful function. But to know that it serves a function, and agree that that function is useful, is a nontrivial thing.
No they aren't If they like playing a fighter then they like the mechanics.
What? Since when is liking "having martial skill and not using magic" equivalent to being absolutely 100% in love with the mechanical characteristics of the 5e Fighter as it exists?
For goodness' sake, we literally had a quarantine subforum for Warlord discussion in Ye Olden Dayse (dear God I can't believe that was almost a decade ago...) specifically because people
weren't happy with the specific mechanics of Fighter but wanted the
thematic content that, by design,
only Fighters could represent.
