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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7935436" data-attributes="member: 6687260">So you think it was rigorously tested and reiterated over time?  I've never heard anyone make that claim about 4E before.To my mind it seems pretty incontestable that 4E was designed and balanced around certain clear mathematical assumptions and that in many cases, perhaps most, powers were clearly designed around those mathematical benchmarks.  I mean, yes in certain cases some powers drift further afield, such as controller ones, but even then within carefully circumscribed bounds.  (The obvious ones being that encounter powers tend to last one round while only Dailies tend to last whole encounters, resulting in the fact that any damage resulting in accident overpower is very limited - and also protected by the fact that while you can have multiple dailies or encounter powers you can't reuse the same one more than once - as in many cases players would be inclined to spam one.)  There's also a fact that a lot of the errata they released seemed to be clearly the result of things that were quickly obvious after release and that should have been caught had there been extensive playtesting.I'm not sure, mind you, that there really is a better way for a rpg to balance a game with lots of options.  To actually open things up and design along the lines of 3.X and Pathfinder and achieve balance would require a level of playtesting and reiteration that would take years and is probably well beyond the resources and ability that any print rpg could do (perhaps a computer based company could manage it).  If you want a game that is genuinely tighty balanced, then you probably have to do it 4E's way.But I think it's pretty clear that achieving that balance does circumscribe the breadth of options somewhat.What if I want to trade off my combat capability to become really good at skills - I can't (There's a good argument to be made of course that allowing PCs the ability to do this is not a good idea as it creates in effect the 'netrunner issue' - but well, who said breadth was always good?)</blockquote>

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