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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8596262" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Y'know, it would be really nice if people could stop using this canard.OD&D was plenty concerned with balance. You literally said, in your own words, that Gygax went out of his way to nerf a class he thought was OP when you think it was fine or even weak. How is that not being super concerned about balance? As for the bit about "not working it out with mathematical precision," sure it was. It's still a statistical model. It's just got a somewhat wider range of accepted results. Things like MU vs Fighter XP tables were not eyeball guesstimated, these were things Gygax built up for a reason.As for the instant-ness of balance...no game goes for that. Instead, it is a matter of short-term balance (e.g., over the course of a full adventuring day) vs medium-term balance (e.g., over the course of a full level) vs long-term balance (e.g., over the course of a full campaign). Gygax's balance was at the level of campaigns. This can be fine, if players are cool with potentially very long stretches of divergence, or more commonly, if you have DMs addressing these weaknesses with ad hoc fixes, like fancy magic items or special story beats for individual characters. Unfortunately, that sort of thing is difficult to do, and many games fold before such stuff can truly mature and bear fruit. That, plus the overall higher opportunity cost of playing the game these days, is why the game has moved pretty steadily toward something between short- and medium-term balance, favoring short-term. The 5e update (whether it be 5.5e or not) is likely going to shift to a specifically "everyone recharges on long rests" schedule in order to more fully support this scale of balance, for example.Other than these two issues, I actually find pretty much everything you've said here reasonable and well-argued. We may not agree on a lot of things, but at least here, you're recognizing a difference as a difference (and saying where the old way was...not necessarily ideal, but what it did do well or at least tried to do well.)There's a certain technique of "balancing" (note the quotes) that was very popular in early D&D and which has largely been left behind in the game today...but which has cast an extremely long shadow on video games. Actually, I guess you could call it two very closely related techniques: so-called "naturalistic" area design, and wandering monster checks/tables."Naturalistic" area design, despite the name, is not particularly naturalistic, in that it both bears little relation to producing actual natural-looking or -behaving environments (DMs will make whatever geography they like, science be damned, and I have no problem with that), but more importantly it isn't really about what environment is present. Instead, it's about what creatures are present. In this "naturalistic" paradigm, it is considered "unnatural" to have much in the way of smooth progressions of difficulty: there could be a red dragon two hexes away from the capital city, or a random hex full of nothing but wild chickens surrounded by hexes of, I dunno, hellhounds or whatever. It's a "balancing" technique because it creates a massive selective pressure for caution, patience, etc., and has a tendency to weed out low-level characters with powerful stats. That helps mitigate your completely correct description of early-D&D balance as "the rich get richer": the rich die just as easily as the poor, but the poor are a lot more common than the rich.Wandering monster checks, on the other hand, create balance by applying moment to moment pressure. The players cannot dawdle, they must always move with purpose. This discourages turtling and overly-cautious play, mitigating some of the issues of the previous technique, which might otherwise induce players with high-stat low-level characters to "protect" that character until it's powerful enough to adventure without fear.The problem with both of these, of course, is that they are very spiky in their balance impact. It's very scattershot. The party might coincidentally never stumble upon the red dragon's lair. They might get lucky and easily defeat the wandering monsters they encounter, or convert those monsters to their side, turning what was once a mitigating factor into a power boost. Neither one is particularly used in more modern game design because of these effects. In video games, however, these things have taken on a life of their own. Many games feature scary-powerful wandering creatures in the world, or World Bosses, or a variety of similar "sudden power spike" type things--not as a balance tool, but as a dangerous foe you witness early and come back to fight later. Some, particularly the early MMOs like Everquest and (to a lesser but still very real extent) World of Warcraft, actually did seem to use these as balance mechanisms...and players really, really didn't like it.In a sense, you could even argue that these tools were specifically replaced by the shift to short-term (e.g. day-length) balance rather than the campaign-length balance Gygax shot for. There is no need to constantly shake up the status quo with sudden disproportionate threats ("naturalistic" area design) nor to put constant pressure on the party (wandering monsters) because you already have, or are intended to have, a reasonable expectation of balance on a small scale. If it's balanced on a small scale, it is assumed that it must thus be balanced on the large scale. Whether that assumption is true or not is another matter entirely.</blockquote>

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