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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7470802" data-attributes="member: 996">A more cogent rebuttal to improving balance-within-the-rules is that we're talking about D&D, and improving balance (especially class balance) by fixing the rules is not remotely on the table.  When it was put on the table, the table was smashed to pieces. As a thought experiment, sure.  But, what if, to extend it and make it more analogous to the game in question, that d100 weapon were so utterly iconic that there was no chance of ever removing it from the game or reduce it's damage.  Say, if, just last decade, they'd come out with a version that was only d12, while most other weapons were upgraded to d10?  And people rejected it so violently that they immediately upgraded it to d20, which still wasn't enough, and cost the game it's dominance, and looked like it might almost have destroyed it completely?Is it still an easy fix to just get rid of that d100 weapon?  No. Mainly because, in most versions of D&D, contributions were never that even, since balance was pretty terrible.(Upthread I did flippantly throw out a hypothetical balance scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being 'adequate' and 1 being 'unplayable.'  I was a little unfair to D&D in saying that it didn't even aspire to 1, it's solidly 1, might even be rounded up to 2 - and an excellent DM can shoot it all the way up to 4.  So I'm sorry about dissing D&D like that.) Making perfect the implacable mortal enemy of not-quite-as-bad, is a common theme in balance discussions, yes.That was an actual point of the 1 (unplayable) to 10 (adequate) scale of balance I proposed.   I wanted to get across the idea that 'perfect' balance is not a goal. Spotlight balance is certainly thing, but hardly the best result balanced mechanics can hope to manage.  Spotlight balance is really even arguably a misnomer:  it's more a way of managing imbalance to make it less obviously unfair, than it is a form of balance, however precarious.  It's like a processed, hydrogenated, balance-substitute product.  <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=";)" /> Yeah, I can see how unconsciousness is equal to blasting hordes of henchmen.  ;|But, yeah, no plausible D&D example is going to be a really /good/ example of balance. Undeniably true, of course.  The impact of the 5MWD is well-known, and can be shown objectively, even with simple math (I suppose a formal proof might even be possible - that would be an amusing waste of time for someone with a lot more math-nerd cred than myself).  13A's essentially encounter pacing - the equivalent of a short rest after every encounter; the equivalent of a long after every 4th encounter - does a fair job of masking the innate imbalance of classes arbitrarily differentiated by resource mix.Certainly not the only solutions, but a lot more plausible to introduce into 5e than more effective/robust mechanical ones (again, see what happens to D&D, historically, when you try to reduce imbalance, mechanically, in the design, rather than just mitigate it at the table).  As neat as the 13A trick is, and as inadequate as the 5e option of just changing rest times as a campaign variant seems to me, I like something closer to what the AiME solution sounds like (can't say I've checked it out).  That is, allowing rests based on the story & the situation - just taking all that DM Empowerment that is such a feature of 5e, and using it unreservedly to enforce the needed pacing at the mechanical level, without (much) impacting the story level.  You make mechanical 'rest' and thus pacing, a slave to the narrative, rather than slaving the pacing of the story to the imperative of mechanically-defined short/long rests coming in a prescribed average ratio to eachother & encounters.</blockquote>

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