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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7622297" data-attributes="member: 996">When your parent company gives you a 50 mil goal, with a 100 mil stretch, and development resources commensurate with those goals, and you pull down less than 50 mil, it's a financial failure - even though you were competing in a 20 mil market.It was an astounding feat of design from the PoV of a long-time D&Der (this would be me) long since resigned to the many problems facing D&D being fundamentally insoluble. But excellent?  No. Even at it's best, D&D has been, as just a game, in the technical sense, relatively poorly designed.  Maybe it's just that 45 years really isn't that long for a brand-new /type/ of game to evolve?  Maybe the design goals have never really been adequately laid out?  Maybe RPGs are intrinsically resistant to good design because they're innately open-ended or "infinite" games?  IDK.   Nope. I understand how it can look that way, if you consider *your* playstyle preferences, habits, or expectations from many years of playing a certain ed a certain way with a certain group to be fact.  But, since I was called out for casually tossing out known quantities without back them up, I went ahead and gave (another - Imaro had given some, too) example /how/ those classes were different."Samey" is a subjective complaint tossed out without foundation in fact.  The facts contradict it. LFQW is a complaint about what is, certainly, and that 4e did away with it is also descriptive.LFQW - among other things - contributed to most editions of D&D having a 'sweet spot' in the middle levels, depending on your preferences, the boundaries of it varied a little, but it was certainly there, with levels above and below being problematic in various ways to various degrees.  4e's 'sweet spot' was prettymuch the whole level range.Now, like I said above, and have said many times, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't or should feel bad about preferring a particular edition.  So, no, I'm not asserting an opinion as fact or denying other's their opinions.  I do put it as loving the game in spite of it's flaws vs for it's flaws, though.  I feel OK doing that, because I've been on both sides of it.  I know what it feels like to really enjoy something in the game that I know is a bad, superfluous or problematic bit of design.  I know what it feels like to appreciate the potential of the game or the broader hobby, in spite of the details of just how bad the 'state of the art' was at the time.  I'm happy to define terms, the best definition of balance I've ever seen is simply: a game is better-balanced the more meaningful, viable choices it can present the player with.  Thus a game with many choices, most of which are actively worthless, and a few of which are extremely potent, is poorly balanced - and so is a game that presents only a few choices, at all.  4e can be held up as the 'best-balanced' version of D&D, but even it has pretty seriously imbalanced areas:  feats, most notably, the fighter's sad position outside of combat is another one I tend to notice, and that Imaro & I apparently agree about.  It's also fine to discuss facts.  But, as soon as the facts start to turn out to support one conclusion over another, it becomes very convenient to start claiming everything is subjective.Yes, you can have very different preferences.  No, they don't change the facts.There's nothing incompatible there.  Whatever reason the design team had for sticking closely to the AEDU framework in the PH & PHII, then tweaking it in the PHII, and abandoning it in Essentials, AEDU still presented balanced, LFQW-erasing, clearly differentiated classes.Surveys of player preference consistently rate the Fighter highest & most-played:  when it was the simplest class in 1e, when it was significantly more complex (especially to build) than the Barbarian in 3e, when it was, as a defender, pretty close to the middle of the pack in terms of complexity, in 4e, when it was again relegated to relative simplicity in Essentials, and when it was given a bone-simple and a couple of somewhat less simplistic options in 5e.  The archetype of the fighter is familiar from heroic fantasy, it's relatable, iconic, it's always been the most popular class, no matter what D&D did to it, mechanically.The runner-up most-popular classes, OTOH, include some the /most/ complicated.So, yeah, I put no stock whatsoever in the "people want a simple class" rubric. The fighter was a simplest class for 25 years.  It's just expectation and familiarity driving the insistence that it be relegated forever to the LF of LFQW.That's a new one.  The story I always heard was that lack of a license left Paizo with nothing to develop for 4e, so they had to do something.  When the GSL came out, it was awful, and they went ahead with PF.  It was the business side, again, pushing the businesses in those directions, but some like to interpret it as "proof" that 4e was "bad."  4e was a terrible business decision.  It was a technically superior game by many metrics that solved multiple long-standing, intractable problems with D&D - much to the horror of a certain segment of the fanbase that /loved/ what they were able to get away with thanks to those long-standing, intractable flaws.No, I do not. I am fine with people playing what they like.  I am not fine with people maligning things they don't like for reasons unrelated to that dislike, that get the facts wrong.  I am not OK with people begrudging others the game they like, and setting out to destroy it.I'm OK with people enjoying what they like, as long as they're not actively warring against what I like.Is that in any way unreasonable?</blockquote>

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