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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9174826" data-attributes="member: 996">Balance is good game design, yes.  And better balance is harder.  Presenting no choices, for instance, is easy, and not balanced, at all. A game is better balanced the more choices it presents to the player that are both meaningful and viable.That's not really incompatible with what you just said.  One of the things I find useful about that definition is that it does include maximizing choices and making them meaningful, not just making them viable, which can be accomplished by taking away choices or making them identical.True, and those criticism were both factually incorrect, play changed significantly as you gained levels, and at each Tier, classes were strongly differentiated by Source and Role and even classes with both in common had their own unique power sets. Even were the latter true, it'd've made 4e /less/ well balanced, since the choice of class would have been less meaningful or even meaningless. The former was more nearly valid on a numeric level:  like 5e proficiency, 4e had a common basic scaling for all characters for attack & skill checks - unlike 3e which had different progressions for BAB, skill (in- vs cross-class), and saves (good/bad) - which is good for creating at-level challenges, since it makes level a more meaningful yardstick of party capability, but potentially reduces differentiation among classes (or even skills) and thus can make choices less meaningful.  So, while different levels are strongly differentiated by scaling, if you factor out that scaling, the differentiation is down to the nature/power and number of resources (and, outside of relatively minor utilities, the latter scaled quite slowly after heroic). 4e can be held up as the best-balanced version of D&D, especially as far as class balance, but it's only the best of a bad lot.It depends on what you mean by "homogenizing."Standardizing resolution on the d20 like 3e did, is homogenizing, for instance.  Deciding to model psionics as mechanically identical to spellcasting, like 5e did, is homogenizing.  Neither are necessarily bad or good for balance.  It depends on whether it erodes how meaningful those choices are. As you said.....so balanced under a tight group of assumptions that favor one side of the comparison, just isn't balanced. Or, you could say, is very poorly balanced.</blockquote>

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