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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7187483" data-attributes="member: 6778044">But balance is a far more complex function of the game. What are you attempting to balance? Their design was to balance the game in a way that any mix of races and classes, in a party of 4, could succeed in an adventure of properly balanced encounters - including both combat and non-combat encounters. This is without the use of magic items, or even requiring any specific race or class to be within the party. It could be no cleric, no rogue, or no spell casters. Regardless, the game has to work.So the balance that makes a game bad for you might not be the same as that for others. Anytime that you get into optimizing, then by definition you are putting your character build out-of-balance. Otherwise there would be no choices at all, there would only be the single, optimized archetype of that character.And nearly every option that I've seen people complain about being underpowered, are inevitably something that one of my players has chosen to play specifically, and has had no complaints about it (and also didn't know that others felt it was "suboptimal").One problem that 2e and 3e ran into with "balance" and "suboptimal" abilities is that they put a lot of non-combat stuff into rules. They were codifying fluff and other things that help define characters. The problem was, for some, that choosing one of those things that further defined your character meant you opted not to beef up your combat facility. No problem if that's not the focus of your game. Even as far back as 1e, you could select a non-weapon proficiency of, say, carpenter, instead of spending those slots on something more readily useful while adventuring. For those of use A good example of how 5e (and 4e before it) sidestepped that issue with spells is to make many of them ritual spells. While that's great for the stat optimizers, it's had an impact on those that had other considerations. Some examples are alarm, Tenser's floating disk and "Leomund's tiny hut." In a campaign where wandering monsters are a possibility, resting is sometimes questionable, or treasure doesn't come in gems and easily carried bags of gold, and encumbrance is a thing, then it kind of broke a number of things. I prefer for the spell casters to make hard decisions about whether to use their magic for utility purposes or combat. Ironically, the move to add damage-causing cantrips would have been enough to give spell casters more combat utility without needing to add rituals too.Personally, I've never had issues with character imbalances. They've never been remotely severe enough to cause an issue with characters of the same level, and we frequently have characters of different levels too (as much as seven levels or more between them), and that also is not a factor. I'll readily admit that players that prefer to optimize their characters don't tend to play in my campaigns for long (at least not with that approach) because that really only works if I'm designing around combat-optimized players. I don't, and while I don't actively try to inhibit them, the types of encounters and tactics the monsters use frequently have that effect. Most of them, however, have stuck around, and just moved away from the optimization approach.</blockquote>

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