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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jacob Lewis" data-source="post: 9774168" data-attributes="member: 6667921">You’re right—D&D’s flexibility wasn’t accidental. It was a deliberate choice to stay ambiguously neutral, refusing to pick a lane so it could appeal to the widest possible audience. The result is a self-inflicted wound that never heals.The problem isn’t that the game supports multiple playstyles—it’s that it tries to do so within one universal expression of D&D. There’s no real reason the brand couldn’t sustain parallel versions: a lighter, narrative-focused mode alongside a crunchier, tactical one. The counterargument is always market fragmentation—splitting one big audience into smaller, incompatible groups. But the alternative isn’t any better: a large audience that can’t agree on what the game should be, perpetually cycling through frustration no matter what’s released.Of course, the moment you suggest parallel versions, people point to TSR’s 2E era as the cautionary tale. The company flooded the market with settings and styles, assuming players would buy everything simply because it all carried the D&D name. That misread the audience. Not every approach appealed to every player, and not everyone could afford (or even wanted) the full product line.So from a business perspective, it’s easy to see why Wizards prefers a single, unified audience they can market every product to. It’s safer, cleaner, and more predictable. But that safety comes at a cost—the inability to truly commit to a defined identity for the game itself.And that’s really the core of it. The decision to remain flexible and broadly accommodating is exactly what prevents D&D from ever resolving its encounter balance issues. Any real fix would require enforcing structure—prescribing pacing, resource limits, and rest constraints. But the designers treat that kind of prescription as antithetical to D&D’s identity. They see too much authority as stripping away the freedom that supposedly defines the game.4E was the closest they ever came to breaking that pattern. It offered DMs genuine control and predictability—encounter budgets, transparent math, and mechanical consistency that made the “adventuring day” an actual, testable framework. But for many players, that clarity felt like overreach. It pulled the curtain back too far, revealing that the fantasy wasn’t just a story—it was a game with visible machinery. The reaction was loud enough that the pendulum swung back, and we’re still living in that recoil.The result is a design philosophy trapped by its own success: a game that wants to be everything to everyone, but can’t fix its foundational problems without alienating part of its audience. Encounter balance will always be an illusion so long as D&D refuses to define what it’s actually balancing for.</blockquote>

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