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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6639548" data-attributes="member: 6787650">To clarify: what seems new to me, having been away from D&D for a decade and a half, is the obsession with class balance in the moment. AD&D classes were often balanced over lifecycles rather than just in the moment, e.g. fighters had weak saves early but the best saves later on; LFQW; thieves gained levels faster than anyone else for a given amount of XP; druids gained levels quickly up through mid levels and then came to a crashing halt around Hierophant level. This made sense in an TSR-era/AD&D context because you could mix-and-match classes to a certain extent; fighter/mages were popular in part because you got the strong early levels of a fighter without entirely sacrificing the strong late levels of the mage. (Level limits complicated the picture.)5E is a new game, by WotC not TSR, in which multiclassing works differently: you pick and choose classes as your total character level increases. Lifecycle-oriented balance is something WotC has deliberately eschewed, because they want a fighter 10/wizard 10 to be as much fun to play as a fighter 20 or wizard 20, so the power curve for fighters and wizards is required to be pretty much linear. Nobody can predict when a fighter will turn into a wizard, so the game designers have endeavored to ensure that each and every level of fighter is approximately as fun and useful as a first level in wizard. I think they did a good job at this, but it's not possible to do the job perfectly. Anyway, it's a different kind of "class balance" than TSR-era D&D had.</blockquote>

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