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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5047000" data-attributes="member: 22779">But, Lanefan, sure, that's fine for you.  But would you consider yourself to be representative of the majority of gamers out there?  Would you consider a 12 year campaign to be the norm?I certainly wouldn't.  WOTC's market research also wouldn't.  It was made pretty clear that the average group and campaign lasts about two years tops.  Sure, if you are in a situation where you can think that long term, that's great.  But, I really don't want to play a game that presumes that as a starting point.What's the point of designing a game with assumptions that you know to be untrue most of the time?And this gets back to the whole design question in my mind.  I agree with you actually.  I think Gygax and co. did design the game for what they played at THEIR table.  This is how it worked for them.  I don't think that "balance" was a real consideration beyond what worked at their table.  They didn't sit down and work from the position that the game should work at most tables.  If you play the way Gygax played, then probably 1e works great for you and it will likely be balanced to a pretty decent degree.  Not because balance was a design priority, but because it worked at their table, so it probably will work at yours (not you specifically Lanefan, just the general you this time.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )  As soon as you started deviating from those baseline assumptions, balance goes straight out the window.  Ariosto claims that there is a large window for PC wealth, for example.  He's right, the 1e DMG gives little to no guidance on how much wealth a PC should have at a particular level.  Thus, we see groups where 5th level characters have Vorpal swords and groups where 10th level characters are lucky to have a +1 Spoon.I would argue that neither group is particularly well balanced.  It's only balanced because the DM massages the system so that challenges match up - either bumping up the difficulty by using nastier monsters, or using weaker monsters.  Thus we achieve Raven Crowkings "Balance in Play" model.  In the end, the game leaves it up to the DM to achieve balance, thus, I would argue, that balance is not a design goal of the game.</blockquote>

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