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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7157443" data-attributes="member: 996">The magnitude of the scaling isn't the issue, it's the variability of it.  You BAB can go up 1/level and your STR or DEX can go up 10 points, plus enhancement bonuses, and you can pick up magic weapons, etc - or your BAB can be 3/4 or 1/2 and it might be impractical to put more than trivial resources towards stats & items to improve your use of weapons.  Skills the variation was even more extreme.  That could have been fixed the way 4e & 5e did it:  just use one progression, 1/2 level in 4e, +4 over 20 levels in 5e.  But that only addresses 'balance' between optimized & unomptimixed d20 rolls, which was not such a huge deal, if you sunk stuff into your d20-mediated speciality, you'd be untouchably good at it, unoptimized characters needn't bother.  'Balancing' what a character is extremely good at vs those who neglect it isn't such a major issue, it's when the character who is barely trying to be good at something is better than the one that tried to specialize in it that you have severe balance problems (and Tier 1 vs Tier 6 classes!).  Actually fixing 3e's mechanical balance issues would have required a total re-design of the classes and scrapping the magic system, at minimum.  Even so, a 3e campaign could be balanced after-market, as it were, by some or all of the following:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> player restraint</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> All players having equivalent system mastery </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> DM brinksmanship</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> 'Living World' style play</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> 'DM force/illusionism'</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> E6 style play</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The banhammer</li> </ul> It's really not in the least debatable.  Even the most virulent h4ters of the edition war wouldn't try to claim 4e wasn't much better-balanced, they'd go with 'too balanced' or 'gave up too much for that balance...'  ;P Like the other examples of 4e balance issues (though this was a pretty minor one), it was quickly cleared up by the continuous stream of errata and new material.  The PH CHA Paladin had some issues, specifically, and Divine Power cleared them up. That's sounding plausible, I think you may have been playing a different game from me, too. <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=";)" />   One of the early complaints was that PC numbers didn't keep up with monsters, not vice-versa.  It was addressed (and over done, IMHO), especially in Essentials, which introduced & re-introduced many balance issues, while simultaneously becoming more parsimonious with errata.  In retrospect, a faltering first step towards 5e...    It was meant to be able to handle the styles of each past edition, and that certainly precludes going to far in any one direction, and requires leaving the DM a great deal of latitude.   As a result, balance (since past editions varied radically, from the baroque & failed balancing mechanisms of the classic game, to the intentional rewards for system mastery of 3.x, to the robust balance of 4e) was also left very much up to the DM.</blockquote>

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