Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7267951" data-attributes="member: 996">Fun's  entirely subjective, balance more objective.  If your goal is fun, and you're already having maximum fun, and you're not concerned with ever duplicating that, everything else is irrelevant, though, sure......and analyzing the source of your fun can even spoil it. ;P I think that's a simplistic way of looking at it.  Removing one overpowered option that renders a dozen others non-viable improves balance, sure.  But, so does adding more balanced options.  And, removing already-balanced options, obviously, reduces balance.   It's not the number of options, it's the number of viable options.  A game with only one viable option is imbalanced, whether it's the only option or the best one among thousands of others that are worthless by comparison.Of course, players could choose to ignore the options in a balanced system, and create identical characters, anyway, so there's no guarantees that a balanced system will deliver it's intended benefits.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It's perfectly fair, but not even a little bit balanced, because there's nothing to balance.... Prioritizing balance can also open a game up to being /more/ fun.  Not so much because balance forces unavoidable fun on everyone, but in that it offers some protection from fun-sinks that can bring a game down... That's fair. Oh, it absolutely is (and, rightly so, for that matter, since 5e /is/ meant to be for everyone who ever loved any past edition of D&D, and that includes 3.5, which was ideal for such shenanigans), just not for exactly the same reasons.  In part, 5e was a reaction to the edition war which was primarily a firestorm around 4e being /too/ balanced, so 5e pendulum-swung away from that.  Not straight back into 3.5 RAW-mastery, but all the way back to the classic game's reliance on and Empowerment of the DM.  So, instead of finding the most stupid broken combo in the game and expecting the DM to let you play it, in 5e you must find the choices that the DM, rather than the system, will most heavily favor in play.  OK, there are some easy/obvious system-favored choices, as well, but they pale compare to what you can get away with 'gaming the DM.'  Also, 5e is the current edition, so the point of entry for new players - who are comparatively defenseless against the experienced would-be game-dominator, which brings us to......of course, they could also be playing 3.x/PF, when they want the challenge of vying for dominance with other experienced system masters.</blockquote>

Verification