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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6663504" data-attributes="member: 996">Not really, if you look at what Celtavian & I were actually saying.  The best-balanced version of D&D - as even the most virulent h4ters will agree (often because they hate balance) - was 4e.  The edition that had the most radically overpowered casters (and thus, by contrast, worst-balanced fighters, in spite of an elegant fighter class design) was 3.x - it brought us the Tier system, afterall.  Again, not a lot of debate about it, though a case could be made for 0D&D to be worst-balance by virtue of being least-evolved.Celtavian decided to group the 5e fighter with all the fighters except the 3e (and possibly, 0D&D), to say 'among the best.'  While I, contrarily, excluded only the 4e fighter, to put the 5e 'among the worst.'   It's not a large set, so when you say 'among the...' implying the top or bottom several, you're only excluding the bottom or top one or two. The 5e fighter is about on par with the 2e fighter:  high-DPR making it powerful in straightforward combats, proficiencies giving it something to do (if nothing that everyone else can't just as easily do) outside of combat.  It's a bland, one-note design, but that note's a loud one. The 2e & 5e fighter's exceptional DPR make them strong contributors in combat, so not among the worst-balanced examples of the class.  The gap, OTOH, between them and the robust class balance of 4e, which included the fighter, is huge.  Ranking second or third notwithstanding.Rather than balancing classes, 5e empowers the DM to maintain spotlight balance in play, making problems with classes less visible at the level of an individual campaign. Dissociative mechanics was made up out of whole cloth by the Alexandrian in an early "review" (h4ter manifesto) of 4e, before the book was even on the shelves.  The definition is a moving target, but most of them amount to little more than a picky way of looking at abstraction. All RPGs necessarily have a lot of abstraction, and a lot of mechanics that fit one definition or another of 'dissociative mechanics,' depending on where the goal-posts have been moved, different mechanics qualify.  Prior to 4e, no one complained about or even noticed 'dissociative mechanics,' even though RPGs were full of mechanics that would meet the definitions once they were contrived.  In 5e, there's very little complaint about 'dissociative mechanics,' even though there are quite a few mechanics that qualify.Yes, it's a h4ter talking point.  No, bringing it up doesn't advance any discussion.Though, it's worth considering that the 'dissociative mechanic' attack, was very consistently directed at mechanics that helped balance the classes, particularly by improving the effectiveness of the martial classes, in 4e.</blockquote>

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