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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6639078" data-attributes="member: 996">Indeed, it doesn't matter.  But, I'm surprised you find the concept of class balance strange or new.  Gygax went on about it in the 1e DMG, and both versions of AD&D had extensive, even baroque, mechanisms in an attempt to provide some balance among the classes (and races).  In retrospect they didn't work very well, but they represented a great deal of thought and effort.Even the idea of a balanced or 'fair' encounter shouldn't be entirely alien.  Early modules were designed for tournaments, which were meant to be fair to the competitors on some level, I assume.  Modules were also rated for the level of player they were designed for, which strongly implies that encounters in them were designed to be level-appropriate challenges.  Random encounter tables weren't all be terrain, there was a set of them by level in the DMG, too, and the monsters that a Summoning spell could conjure up were also a de-facto yardstick of level-appropriateness.  There was a rough correspondence between dungeon level and degree of danger/difficulty, as well.  The mere lack of explicit encounter design guidelines doesn't mean no one ever tried to create balanced encounters, just that it wasn't easy to do so - more art than science.</blockquote>