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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9174757" data-attributes="member: 996">(I should share a definition of balance that I encountered that I've found helpfulA game is better balanced the more choices it presents to the player that are both meaningful and viable.)Perfect balance is impossible, and better balanced games are increasingly more difficult to create & maintain.Presenting the characters with more choices, so they can do a wider variety of things that are worth doing, is creating a better balanced game.I don't believe the fundamental disagreement is about sorts of balance.The Fighter v Wizard math calculations are an example.  They show the fighter theoretically balancing with the wizard in DPR (the fighter's best thing, nearly it's only thing & not exactly the much more versatile wizard's best thing), over the vaguely recommended 6-encounter day, if those encounters are against a relatively low number of foes, and non-DPR resources are not considered. That there are so many other ways to play the game that place less emphasis on single-target DPR, only means the actual martial/gap is that much wider. (Though, TBF, tradition implies the default way to play the game is grueling time-important dungeon crawls.)I think it was just a pendulum-swing.  3e made skills the stuff of extreme specialization, you could either invest heavily in a skill and be awsome (insane/broken if it was Diplomacy), or as you leveled, you became utterly worthless at it against same-level challenges - "overwhelming the d20."  4e moved off that peak by giving everyone a baseline progression so even untrained stayed relevant at higher levels, while trained/specialized became extremely good.  5e continued towards the opposite peak, where training/level just doesn't make much of a difference and "everyone's got a shot" - Expertise has kept it off that peak. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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