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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7153669" data-attributes="member: 996">For decades, electric cars couldn't get traction(pi), it was a technological thing - and a generational thing.  The technology arrived, and the generation that couldn't handle the idea of a car that didn't go 'vroom' aged into a less important segment of the car-buying demographic. World of difference between 'diverless cars are available' and driving being illegal.  The technology for the former is already here, and the obvious entry point for them is giving independent mobility to people who can't drive, themselves.  From that to 'driving a car manually is depraved indifference to the lives of others' would likely take generations... <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=";)" /> (I think what I said was that balance isn't designed to be the default state of the game, not that it was not considered, at all.)Balance in 4e, particularly class balance, was different, it was robust and designed-in from the ground up.  You didn't have to stick to a specific pacing to keep a semblance of class balance, and encounter difficulty swung much more on level than relative numbers or day length.  In one sense, you could play in many more styles, because you could vary pacing/challenge/emphasis without wrecking class balance - in another sense, more central to the D&D experience, you couldn't, because there are hallowed styles that require radical class imbalance, and very high impact from resource management and rest timing.  4e was unique that way, resulting in the edition war, and 5e was a reaction to that, so couldn't treat balance the same way.Of course balance is still part of the 5e design paradigm, as it's been part of every edition.  It's just that earlier editions aimed for balance and failed dramatically, while 3.x intentionally 'rewarded system mastery' with opportunities to imbalance the game.  5e tries to be all D&Ds to all D&Ders, and that includes at least leaving open to the possibility of it being (im)balanced in a way at least suggestive of each prior edition... and, of course, like the DMG 'modules' implementing that is left up to the DM.   Thus the 6-8 encounter guideline, it's not a OneTrueWay that's assumed as a default, and you'll wreck your game if you deviate from it, it's a guideline.  If you want to have some semblance of class balance and are willing to narrow the kind of campaign you run so you can use the encounter-building guidelines with some hope of them them producing challenging encounters, it's there for you to use.  If you want your game to feel more like AD&D, you might use it as a vague guideline in dungeon type adventures.  If you want your game to feel more like 3e, you'll ignore it, and maybe loosen the concentration rule...</blockquote>

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