But a balanced game is not the only style of play. Some players are very addict to gimmicks, combo and sheninigans.
When system-masters engage an imbalanced system, they ignore trap choices, gravitate to best choices, and create a de-facto 'balanced' meta-game from the viable sub-set of the imbalanced one. When novices engage an imbalanced game, they either accidentally hit upon a balanced sub-set of it, or the game crashes and burns.
D&D is one of the rare game that allow to apply the rules differently at each table, in order to satisfied the mood of the Dm and the players.
Literally every game is subject to rule interpretations & house rules. D&D isn't even rare in admitting that. It is not even, among RPGs, terribly unusual in presenting itself in a way that demands it. Rather, 3.x/PF/4e/E communities were unusual in valuing 'RaW' so highly.
There's definitely truth to the idea that spellcasters can impact the game in ways non-spellcasters can't. That's the whole idea behind magic, right?
Is it? Is "magic" a gamist construct with the intent of giving some players more, more meaningful, and higher-impact decisions than others, most of the time?
Or is magic a fantasy bit? A marker of the genre that hearkens back to ancient pre-scientific beliefs, myths, & legends?
But that's not a bad thing, in my opinion. Some people don't want to be flying and shooting magic zaps at their enemies, they want to cut them to pieces or smash them to bits. Nothing wrong with that.
It's a meaningful difference in character concept, and one that, sorta, reflects genre (not many heroes in myth/legend flew around magically zapping their enemies, while a lot dueled them with weapons or wrestled them - or, quite often, followed some sage advice to defeat them in a less direct way), so if the choice is presented, either option would need to viable in the context of the expected range of play for the game...
Well- first of all, of course what a character does is dependent on its capabilities to a great extent. But the (or at least a) whole point of rpgs is that a creative player can stretch beyond the boundaries of what's written on the sheet. Nowhere on a fighter's character sheet does it have a number for rolling a boulder off the edge of a cliff at an enemy camp, for instance.
"Hey, let's camp under this cliff with huge boulders on top of it!" "Sounds cool, I never bought that 'seize the high ground' maxim, anyway, and I don't feel like climbing..."
::fighter gets creative::
"...OK, after having boulders rolled down on us, we're going to camp on /top/ of the cliff..."
::mage gets creative ::
"...ack! Boulders are raining out of the sky!" "I told you that 'high ground' thing was useless..."
More importantly, though, the fact is that there are lots of players who enjoy playing gritty warriors or sneaky thieves without spells. If it works for the players who enjoy that style of character, I'm not sure what there is to fix.
Yep, the fighter is the stand-out, most popular class in D&D, and always has been, in spite of being the stand-out least-versatile, most-consistently-overshadowed class (though frequently challenged in the latter by the Thief/Rogue and various one-offs). So there's no need to make it balanced, because people will keep playing it until they learn better, it's just part of the whole right of passage from newb to grognard.
I can't second guess your experiences (for obvious reasons!),
Though my experiences with new players are extensive, and cover much of the game's history, they are /geographically/ very limited, just to the South & East Bay portions of the greater SF Bay Area.
but I am faithfully reporting what Mearls said. I have tried to find links but have failed to Google up an archive of his Legends & Lore columns - maybe they all got deleted when the WotC site changed?
They were, yes, I've run into the same problem, sometimes you can dig one up on the wayback machine.
Mike's L&Ls were often diplomatic to the point of being obscure. But I may (as usual) be making a point badly. He certainly did go on about new players, but the thrust of those comments were about making the game 'simpler' (and 5e is simpler only if you consider 'more like the classic game' to be simpler, which is likely how many of us who have been at it for a long time perceive it, since the classic game is /familiar/, which feels simple, to us), and in going back and trying to re-capture what made the game welcoming to new players at the height of the fad (though he'd never acknowledge it had been a fad, of course), which, of course, is really just doubling down on making the game appeal to long-time & returning players.
Ultimately, the 5e design does little to make it accessible to new players who try it, but it goes a long way towards making it less intimidating, and the toxic aspects of the environment surrounding it have all but disappeared. IMHO/X, 5e acts more like classic D&D with regard to new players, it doesn't maximize retention, overall, but it does keep new & existing fans in accord when it comes to the vision of the game & its identity. (I hope I put that diplomatically enough without making it too obscure.)
He said that sales of the Essentials Red Box were good, but that retention was low.
The Red Box was a package specifically designed to entice returning players to buy it, with contents that were all but calculated to utterly repel them - and probably weren't as great for genuinely-new players as they might've been. Of course it was a disaster. 5e learned from that mistake, and provided contents that would seem familiar to those returning players, be reasonably acceptable to most existing ones (with a very few outliers like CapnZapp, here), and a package/shelf-presence that wouldn't intimidate new players.
D&D is a mechanically complex game (anyone who thinks that 5e is "lite" needs to play some genuinely mechanics-light games!) and has a lot of places where it is possible to make choices that are better or worse from the mechanical point of view.
To stay on the above point a moment longer: yes, 5e is a decidedly complex game, the exact opposite of what it, it's lead designer, and it's most ardent fans present it as - and that complexity is bad for new/casual-player retention. And, yes, there are definitely many choices that are mechanically better or worse, the root of the issue in this thread is that some are better or worse in strict way, when a balanced way might have been more desirable.
For instance, if a player's lowish-level PC comes up against a heavily-armoured hobgoblin and is not buffed in some way, and the player uses the -5/+10 from GWM, then that player is probably making a bad choice, as the drop in the chance to hit will burden the expected damage more than the +10 boosts it. Part of learning to be a good player is learning both (i) the maths, and (ii) interpretation of the ingame elements, such as that hobgoblins tend to have high ACs, especially if described as heavily armoured.
Yep, he's "acquiring players skill" to use a Gygaxian phrase, in a 3.x system-mastery context.
If the need to do that drives him crazy, he may well be out of the hobby, if it appeals, he's fitting in.
When that player, or others in the group, then have the idea of pouring buffs onto that PC to offset the -5 and thereby get the benefit of the +10, the group should feel that they have made a good decision and improved their play. That's a good part of what the play of a mechanically intricate game like D&D is about! (Which has nothing to do with it being a MMO or boardgame. But it has mechanics, quite elaborate ones as far as combat is concerned.)
IDK, it seems like exactly the kind of cooperative 'tactical play' that earns those attacks.
Designing a system so that new players are able to have that sort of experience seems to me to be a serious design goal which can be done better or worse. The problem, which I think you agree with, is that it is hard to meet that design goal while also meeting the goal of not having the game break in the hands of hardcore wargamers, who will see the implications of the maths, of PC synergies, etc straight away and adopt a systematic approach to maximising their output.
Yes, I agree. I might go a bit further and suggest that providing that experience to the new player, is quite likely to, with a few iterations, train him to adopt the ethos of the 'hardcore' D&Der.
I don't know. And I don't know enough to speculate. It seems to me that the most typical (not necessarily dominant, but it seems to me most numerous) ENworld poster, who is an experienced RPGer, is less of a wargame-type player and more of a GM-curated experience type player. For those players the issues that the OP is complaining about won't arise, provided the GM is doing a half-decent job.
Well, D&Der, rather than wargamer or
GM-curated-experience-player. We're heavily
DMs, here.
Yes. Action economy is also part of the same analysis. Whether or not one agrees with the OP's conclusions in respect of these matters, there's clearly been no ignoring of them. In a single sentence: if you don't use feats, fighters get overshadowed by the damage-dealing abilities of some cantrip-users; if you does use feats, a couple of dominant archetypes (GW, SS) crowd out the rest.
I don't think 'overshadowed by cantrip DPR' is quite fair. The fighter needs to dominate in DPR, because so much of the class's design is hard-coded to that contribution, leaving it little versatility to contribute elsewhere (outside of DPR, the fighter can contribute as a blocker, if the DM abets him, and outside of combat, it can 'warm body' contribute in areas others have neglected completely, and that's about it). Even in the worst case, the fighter grinding away with big damage won't be overshadowed by comparable big damage from some optimized cantrip build, rather, he'll be sharing the spotlight the only times he has a reasonable chance of actively claiming it, while still being overshadowed everywhere else.
(Personally, I don't buy that being a DPR-savant is enough to balance any class, mechanically. There's just no magic DPR number that's balanced. There's a tipping point, and as you get near it, you'll either be overpowered or overshadowed, depending on how things tip in the campaign, but you'll /never/ be balanced.)
Anyway, if a fighter player can embrace that approach to the class, having a sorcerer compete in DPR while shielded by the fighter may not be a problem at that table.
The 5e fighter is not much for shielding anybody. It has +1hp/level, heavy armor (which can also get by playing a particular race, and AC isn't exactly impossible to come by without it), and nothing much to make it 'sticky' (because that'd be 'MMO like aggro' and that bridge was burned).
The sorcerer has the option, at any point up to the last couple of rounds, to stop doing damage and instead use some other spell. That is a flexibility the fighter can't match. How much is it worth? I don't know, and there's probably no table-invariant measure, but surely quite a bit!
Nod. D&D 5e classes have, strictly, slightly different hp potentials, slightly different AC/save potentials, significantly different maximum DPR potentials, profoundly different resource-management ranges, and vastly different levels of versatility/flexibility. They're meant to be mechanically balanced by the first three, and situationally balanced by the DM exerting pressure on the last two.
The upshot it the game can only be played in a narrow band if class balance is to be enforced, and, similarly, if played outside that small functional zone, can be played with only a sub-set of the choices presented to the players remaining viable.
Zap runs his game outside the 'zone,' and is lamenting those obviated choices.
In essence, he's opened the panel that says "no user serviceable parts within, opening this panel voids your warranty," then sent the box in for a warranty repair.
Or maybe not lol. What can I say, my entire life is around the validation I get from an internet forum and the opinion of random strangers 
