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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7436710" data-attributes="member: 996">It seem strange to actually have to say things like that, but I think "different from what it actually is" may be broadly & innately unacceptable on some level.I mean, OT1H, everyone has always played D&D quite differently, but OTOH, everyone identifies as 'playing D&D' (particularly of the current edition), so what constitutes D&D is sort of an identity issue.   OK, that's for the serious hard-core fans, for the casuals, though, a similar thing applies - a game that's stable in it's rules & identity is more approachable (no matter how complex or objectively 'bad' it may be), and putting a little time into learning enough of it to play doesn't seem like automatically-wasted effort, the way it might if it were constantly changing......continual improvement might be good in a great many things, but stability has it's value, too. My observation would be that 1e, 3.0 and 4e were the editions most openly concerned with balance.  Balance in 1e was extremely complicated, valid only over a long campaign (possibly even involving multiple PCs per players), and heavily DM-mediated (as was every aspect of the classic game, of course), but there was a clear intention to deliver a balanced game and advice and cautions on doing so peppered the 1e DMG.2e did not seem so concerned about balance, at least, it didn't mention it as much as Gygax did, IIRC.  While capping low-level spell damage might have helped overall (including class) balance some, I think, from the way 2e also beefed up monsters, it was probably mostly about keeping encounters from being one-shotted by a single character casting a single spell - also a balance issue, of course, but a more specific one not necessarily about overall balance... of course, I'm just speculating about the edition I'm least familiar with after BECMI & 0e... This is just an aside, but I did make a knife-thrower in 3e, and, yeah, he was pretty marginal in spite of being optimized to the hilt(pi) and very nicely modeling the concept, a 4e reprise of him was just OK on no great optimization effort (one of the MP2 ranger builds fit pretty well).   This is probably obscure, but the Geoffrey Holder character from '76's The Swashbuckler is my iconic knife-throwing character.  <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=";)" /> The 1e balance-over-long-campaigns & many-characters, above, for instance.  'Fairness' would be a better way of describing it, IMHO. The fighter is meant to be "best at fighting with weapons," daggers are weapons, it's not an unintuitive build to attempt if you want a combat-oriented knife-thrower, even if it is probably a mistake.... Not an issue that the OP was complaining about, I don't think, but they probably can be pretty close to equally effective - and both, the OP's point was, would be inferior to the guy with greatsword or longbow, with all the stops pulled out. I sorta agree:  the kind of action he wants - official changes to the game - is pretty clearly off the table for the life of 5e (which may well be the foreseeable life of D&D).  They are 'required' to actually correct the issues, with the game, tautologically enough, they are just not going to happen.  I think it's clear Zapp (& his players) can correct the issues they perceive in the context of their own game, he just seems to be tired of doing so, and/or chaffing under the restrictions that fixing-up/working-around the system's failings imposes.  It's not an unreasonable thing to want, a balanced game that requires less sheer effort to keep running smoothly even with more experienced players having their wicked ways with it, it's just futile to want that from D&D, at least until something at least as apocalyptic as the edition war happens to cause WotC to wince & change course again.  (Sorry Zapp, you're just out in the cold on this one.) No, they are definitely issues with the game, itself, they are, after all, issues with the RAW, which is, however pedantically, what the game /is/, the B&W collected between the covers, even as it's not how the game is intended to be played. Frankly, most of the push-back he gets on the forum is prettymuch saying, implying, or in the spirit not of not caring or not having an issue but having no problem with him addressing the issue, but in the form of /not wanting the issue fixed under any circumstance, for anyone, ever/.  Which is bizarre, and probably an artifact of the medium, rather than what anyone's really trying to say.  Maybe it's just that any push-back in text, lacking the nuance of in-person communication, just comes off as confrontational or dismissive or whatever.  The medium is certainly very prone to long back-and-forth verbal(textual?) shoving matches.   It's not like he didn't seriously consider that option.  He feels, and he's not exactly off base, that without leveraging those feats, the fighter (at least), is not competitive with other classes, not in the sense of not doing the same DPR as them, but in the sense of not doing enough additional DPR to make up for the class's relative lack of utility in other areas.  (I don't agree, I don't see how the feats actually do make up the difference - no amount of DPR can, really.  DPR is an easy to measure, but clumsy factor, and, like its sole purpose of reducing an enemy to 0 hps, it's balance by walking towards a cliff, it makes no difference until you actually fall of the cliff, a character 'balanced' by high DPR is either under-contributing, or OP - and can even manage to be /both/.) Well... then there's SS, which is an obvious pick for any would-be Robin Hood type, based on the name, alone, and while the -5/+10 won't win you any archery competitions, ignoring disadvantage at long range will probably help...For more reasons than just DPR, sure.  If we discount DPR, entirely, we might as well retire the Fighter, Barbarian, & Rogue, at minimum.Nod. The "make the game better" ship has sailed, gone over the horizon, been attacked by a kraken, sunk with all hands drowned/eaten, dragged to the bottom of a deep-sea trench and buried under millions of tons primeval sludge.  There are no bone-fragments of the long-dead horse left to lay the whip to.   There can be.  Rewarding system mastery was a big positive for 3.x/PF, and that involved including metaphorical M:tG-style 'Timmeh Cards,' options that looked fun/cool/effective, but were significantly less powerful in actual play, while more obscure, unintuitive, or uninteresting seeming options could be combined to create something far more powerful.  That kind of value requires the choices in question be less powerful, but in a 'stealth' fashion that can provide learning experiences to the less experienced or more casual player - 'traps.'Things being less powerful or less effective or more limited along some dimensions, but 'better' along others, also has definite value in adding diversity of choice and depth of play - but that sense of 'less powerful' constitutes /balance/. As many as ran around a battlefield unarmed using 'martial arts,' or casting spells - vanishingly few & short-lived.  ;PBut D&D doesn't model a battlefield - and least, not at all well. Because he's a peasant?   But, 'realistically,' you can kill someone instantly with a dagger - by accident.  There's nothing remotely realistic about D&D hps/AC/etc - yet we get realism-based arguments.  ::shrug:: Plenty.  Capp's thesis is that the optimized-to-the-wall GWM fighter is, in fact, balanced enough (for him) with the equally experienced wizard.  Die.Seriously, though, they misappropriated a lot of options from the fighter (and all other characters, really, but the fighter missed them the most, because it had so little going for it...).    If we are talking DPR, balance without feats or MCing is fair-to-poor, depending on the nature of the combats that confront the PCs and the relative system mastery of the participants (and, of course, the whim of the DM).    If we're talking impact on the story?  Balance is non-existent until imposed by the DM. Not that big a one, really.  DPR is one of the more nearly-balanced things in the game, because it is so quantitative, if you do manage to reduce the challenges to little more than that, you can get the classes to more or less line up, the vaunted versatility of the Tier 1 set matters little, but they make it up with the occasional AE damage jackpot shoring up their overall DPR. Dungeons full of locks & traps and campaigns full of combat are both things that happen in D&D.</blockquote>

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