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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9185990" data-attributes="member: 6790260">If it is a fact that balance does nothing for the gamegive your evidence for that claim.Hold yourself to the same standard you hold others.No, it hasn't. Crawford himself explicitly said that in an interview. He explicitly said that the Warlock was falling behind other classes because people weren't taking enough short rests.That is, by the designer's own explicit words, failing to meet the goals for which it was designed.Sales figures are not design goals, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.In a word? Kinda.In rather more words? Not exactly, but not entirely "no" either.Sometimes, yes, it will be just sheer ignorance. Sometimes it will be mistaken beliefs; that's what caused the problems with Warlocks. Sometimes, it will be a lack of testing: that's what caused the "ghoul surprise," and made them hastily scramble to try to fix saving throws. Sometimes, it will be love of an idea that makes them overlook the faults (Mearls, for example, loves throwing fistfuls of dice, so he preserved fistful-of-dice mechanics long after they had proven unpopular and problematic.) Sometimes, it will be running out of time. That's what screwed over the Sorcerer (and also Warlock); they completely abandoned the first playtest attempt (which was actually incredibly cool and I'm still super mad they instantly yeeted it rather than trying to improve it), and never did any further public playtesting, which meant the class we got out the other side was half-baked.Sometimes, they do know the imbalance is there, but (rightly or wrongly) believe it won't matter that much. Sometimes, they (rightly or wrongly) believe that people will overreact to the change, and then settle down later. Sometimes, they (rightly or wrongly) believe that other shifts or changes will compensate for the difference.I'm simply going by their actual words. The designers of 3e, 5e, PF1e, and PF2e have all explicitly stated that making a balanced game is something they desire and seek out. They have made design errors that resulted in unbalanced things during playtest, such as the aforementioned "ghoul surprise," and taken steps to correct that imbalance, rather than leaving it in place. They have responded--sometimes explicitly!--to player feedback saying that a subclass feature is unbalanced, and have removed that feature. (In this case, it was giving extra spells to new Sorcerer subclasses. Sadly, they took the wrong lesson; what people were saying was, "It sucks that the old Sorcerer has so few spells, if you're going to give this to new ones, give us errata so older subclasses also get spells!" What they took from that was, "oh, we shouldn't give these new Sorcerers bonus spells? Gotcha.")Nope. It means that they have either conscious or subconscious beliefs/attitudes which are logically incompatible, but which they do not know are logically incompatible. That is a big problem when working on large, complicated things. Worldbuilding, for example, often runs into trouble like this because people want a world which makes sense and follows rules that are common between the fictional world and the real one (e.g., riviers flow downhill), but they often are woefully ignorant about how rivers actually work and will thus make ridiculous fantasy geography that couldn't possibly work. Or they'll have civilizations that have lasted for fifty thousand years completely unchanged, when humanity hasn't had civilization for a tenth of that time and has changed in more ways than we could possibly describe. Etc.The designers of both 5e and PF2e have expressly said, both in their own personal statements and in the books they've published, that different player classes are meant to be team players, not casters and caddies. They have explicitly recognized that having casters be significantly more powerful than non-casters is a flaw that should be corrected. That's (explicitly) why 5e includes the Concentration mechanic when 3e didn't--it was intended to bring better balance to casters. (It is a step, but other steps weakened that goal.)Balance is something game designers value. Degenerate solutions and dominant strategies are undesirable; they produce dull, un-engaging gameplay. A balanced game eschews these things.</blockquote>

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