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What does balance mean to you?
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7162382" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>Sorta, yeah. When 'trap' options are recognized as such, they fall off the menu, and the game becomes essentially as balanced as a game that simply didn't offer those options in the first place, just with a system-mastery bar to clear to get there. </p><p></p><p>There's really not much of a distinction, in that context, between a game with few options, all of which are balanced, and a game with the same balanced options, plus many more that are meaningless and/or non-viable. </p><p>Both offer the same choices to a savvy player.</p><p></p><p>The distinction matters when the player can't tease the viable from the non-viable choices.</p><p></p><p> Play experience. They hypothetical 'casual' group wouldn't use a quantitative metric to detect a balance issue ahead of play, so they'd experience the consequences in play. A player makes choices that seem to fit his character concept, but the character doesn't live up to the concept, and he's frustrated. Another character with a different concept might step in to help when the first character fails at his thing, and do it better, because his choices, though made for different reasons, coincidentally fill out that first concept better than the choices that seemed more appropriate for it. They might laugh it off. The second player might never make such an attempt again, the DM might give the first character a boost - there are lots of ways of dealing with such issues (including identifying and fixing the underlying balance problem, up-front, though, when you think about it, trying to do that for everything, rather than just the specific things applicable to the concepts your players want would be quite the undertaking).</p><p></p><p> Keeping optimization in mind as a cautionary consideration, in system design, would mean prioritizing balance more highly than 5e seems to have done. But, emphasizing DM Empowerment means that same caution can be passed from a design consideration to campaign consideration, so in that sense, sure.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7162382, member: 996"] Sorta, yeah. When 'trap' options are recognized as such, they fall off the menu, and the game becomes essentially as balanced as a game that simply didn't offer those options in the first place, just with a system-mastery bar to clear to get there. There's really not much of a distinction, in that context, between a game with few options, all of which are balanced, and a game with the same balanced options, plus many more that are meaningless and/or non-viable. Both offer the same choices to a savvy player. The distinction matters when the player can't tease the viable from the non-viable choices. Play experience. They hypothetical 'casual' group wouldn't use a quantitative metric to detect a balance issue ahead of play, so they'd experience the consequences in play. A player makes choices that seem to fit his character concept, but the character doesn't live up to the concept, and he's frustrated. Another character with a different concept might step in to help when the first character fails at his thing, and do it better, because his choices, though made for different reasons, coincidentally fill out that first concept better than the choices that seemed more appropriate for it. They might laugh it off. The second player might never make such an attempt again, the DM might give the first character a boost - there are lots of ways of dealing with such issues (including identifying and fixing the underlying balance problem, up-front, though, when you think about it, trying to do that for everything, rather than just the specific things applicable to the concepts your players want would be quite the undertaking). Keeping optimization in mind as a cautionary consideration, in system design, would mean prioritizing balance more highly than 5e seems to have done. But, emphasizing DM Empowerment means that same caution can be passed from a design consideration to campaign consideration, so in that sense, sure. [/QUOTE]
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