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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6077498" data-attributes="member: 17106">Who says playing a fighter means you're "stuck"? Most off the players I've had over the years favor fighters over all other classes, and certainly favor nonmagical characters over Vancian spellcasters. Playing a wizard isn't treated as desirable; it's an adventurous choice that requires a lot of work and imposes a lot of uncertainty. With a fighter, you can plug and play and you know what you're getting. As far as the fighter's desirability concerned, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the fighter is the best designed class in the core 3e game. It's the one that really shows how 3e advanced from 2e (in that it's barely even a class, among other things), and it ought to have been the starting point for any future iteration of the game. The Vancian magic system is what needs changing.But to your original point, there are plenty of places other than football where this is true. Ever play Civilization? Once meaningful mechanical differences between civilizations were introduced there emerged clear best and worst choices for particular playstyles, with some simply being better than others overall. Some people are best suited with playing Mongols, others really need to be Romans or Indians. Personally, in Civ IV, I'm pretty much an Inca. Is that the best choice? Not for everyone, but it is for me. The same is ultimately going to be true of any game that posits different roles and asks players to assume one of them: there will never be complete parity between them, and some people will always gravitate more towards some than others.So I just can't understand your position, which is apparently that all character choices should be equally viable for all players. Often times the parity of character creation choices is described as constituting the "balance" of the game; and it's not that. At best, it's a small subset of it. And it's this bizarrely monolithic focus on one relatively unimportant aspect of the game, apparently shared by the D&D 4e and 5e writers that has lead to the neglect of virtually everything else.You have correctly ascertained that B/X is not part of my thought process, nor do I even know what it stands for. And frankly, if I-the guy who's been DMing for a decade and regularly reading D&D message boards for almost as long-don't know, then most of the D&D player base probably doesn't either. D&D has a complex and esoteric history. I don't see the relevance (and in any case, my examples are arbitrarily chosen and I'm sure that version of the game offers spellcasters numerous significant capabilities that noncasters lack).</blockquote>

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