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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6799670" data-attributes="member: 996">I have to disagree.  Using planned attrition as way of balancing the game at a point probably goes back to 3.0, at the very latest.  And single encounters or traps or what-have you weren't the real challenge in old-school, either, it was surviving a series of them by managing resources.  Wandering monsters, for instance, rarely wiped parties, but if they even did a few hps, they'd hurt them.  Classic D&D wasn't somehow 'not attrition' because it had SoDs, all an SoD did was kill someone - a little more often than not, a thief - that someone was a resource, and losing him was part of the attrition that would eventually drive you out of the dungeon.  If you like the meta-game implicit in character optimization, no other version of D&D holds a candle to 3.x/PF, at least in that department.  Sometimes actually playing it can seem like an unnecessary formality, but chargen/level-up is really something.I thought so when I ran across it.  I find it's a good one, because it gets to the point of balance, which is not making the game perfect or automatically fun, but just preventing the game from sucking.  <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=";)" />  There's also another factor, which how 'robust' that balance might be.  A game can be balanced when played with a specific party composition against a certain number of challenges per day, but broken with a different pacing or party, for instance.  And, even if a game presents imbalanced options, the players can always exercise restraint and simply not choose them, re-defining what's 'viable' in the context of the campaign they're in.Finally, a DM can adjust or enforce balance on the fly.  That's where 5e can prettymuch get away with not worrying about balance, at all, in the design phase, because it gives the DM so much latitude.  He can impose the sort and level of balance he wants, and any designed-in balance is almost moot.  Almost.  <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=";)" />  Obviously, as we can see in this threads, some DMs want to be able to count on some degree of balance from the system to start. In the more theoretical case where you can't know what the DM or other players will do, only the top builds that can compete with eachother are 'viable,' because someone else might bring in such a build (you can't count on player restraint or DM force).  That's the degree to which the game, itself, is balanced.  The less robust that balance, the more it can vary from campaign to campaign.It does provide a modest number of choices relative to other modern editions, and an impressive number compared to older ones.  The tricky bit is how viable they are, and the somewhat subjective bit how meaningful.  And, of course, how much you can deviate from the point at which it balances before that balance is lost (which is part of the point of this thread: can you reduce encounters/day while preserving any balance that may already exist).That can be an indicator of poor balance, because those builds might be rendering other less encounter-shreddy builds non-viable.  As the DM ratchets up encounters to challenge such builds, other builds become non-viable. 'Easy' is relative.  If the game were 'well-' (robustly) balanced, you could have players of different levels of system mastery and 'seriousness' in the same party with minimal issues.</blockquote>

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