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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5039488" data-attributes="member: 22779">What has been demonstrated in many fields is that one can plan for emergent properties AFTER those properties have been identified.  You've got the cart before the horse.  If game balance is an emergent property, then you would have to play and play until you reached that balance and then reverse engineer backwards to create a game which would result in that property.In other words, you couldn't actually design for balance in the first place.  I suppose this does fit rather well with the evolution of 1e - a rough collection of rules put together and then massaged until something like balance was achieved at one table.The problem is, as soon as you deviated in any way from how the game was played at Gygax's table (or a rather small number of tables mostly played by the same people), balance fell apart because it was designed in reverse.  You can achieve balanced play in 1e, but only by playing in a fairly narrow, restricted way.3e, OTOH, was very rigorously playtested.  Balance wasn't based on the end result.  They looked at numerous tables and designed to how people were actually playing, rather than trying to dictate to the players how the game should be played.  IMO, 4e took a similar approach but mostly seemed to focus on the RPGA play.  A mistake IMO that has caused much of the backlash against 4e.In case you think I'm being unduly harsh on 1e, remember the vast numbers of claims from 1e adherents who tell all and sundry, whenever this sort of thing comes up, that we were playing the game wrong.  Ariosto claims strongly that the mega-dungeon was the presumed style of play.  RC and the Shaman have also both claimed numerous times that certain playstyles are not the intent of 1e.  RC has claimed that no one will ever clean out dungeons for example.  That no one will ever discover everything in a dungeon, thus keeping leveling slower.I've seen claims that the DMG is absolutely verbotten to the players and anyone allowing players to see the DMG is playing wrong.  That the game was meant to be low magic with magic items being about as common as hen's teeth.  On and on.  Heck, now we're being told that 1e was as rigourously playtested as 4e.  Come on.  Do you honestly believe that?  If it was, why was the final edit of the rulebooks so bad, with rules scattered throughout several books and sometimes written in language that continues to baffle to this day?  I know there is a strong bent here to proclaim all things 1e superior to everything that came later, but, really?</blockquote>

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