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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9187799" data-attributes="member: 996">It reads to me as "the problem is very real, and D&D has consistently failed to solve it"Which may be over-generous in that it implies the latest edition tried to solve it.That point has been made a lot, yes, to justify profound imbalance.I am frankly skeptical of it, I think it's a solution in search of a problem, and its very telling that in 5e we got the Champion, but not the Elementalist.But, it brings up a question:   how do your balance versatility vs specialization?  (Because 'simple' seems to mean 'specialized')And the answer is probably similar to balancing powerful/limited resources vs no resources: only by tightly constraining the scope of play.  Like very theoretically, for DPR only, the 5e fighter & wizard balance around the 6 encounter encounter day with less 3 or fewer enemies per encounter.  Not very practical.Like, the Netrunner Problem is well-known, you have a specialist so much better at it's one thing that only that character participates when the specialty comes up.  The problem here is the opposite, the specialist is only fully-participating when the specialty comes up, the rest of the time, it's under- or non- contributing.I guess the bottom line is that one player sitting out 80% of the game vs 4 players sitting out 20% may strike some sort of superficial mathematical balance, but it's not good game balance. It's just not very desirable compared to all players participating.</blockquote>

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