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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7887606" data-attributes="member: 996">Class, race, & background are equally-weighted choices, and level advancement is also equal in 5e.  It seems like they'd be intended to be equal in some sense. They're not.But, if you want to restrict broken to functionality. Functionality can be judged pretty easily, but few rules are strictly non-functional, even the "4e issue," the original SC rules, functioned, they just got easier as they got more complex which was counterintuitive.  3e CR, is a toss-up between the CR system being non-functional, and rewards for system mastery being so extreme as to overwhelm an otherwise functional system.  Arguably swaths of 1e & 5e are non-functional "RaW" but, just as arguably, they're not meant to be used that way. <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=";)" />I've also seen 'broken' used to refer to susceptibility to system mastery (3e is tops in that category, too, by a large margin, since it was designed to be), which is fair - breakable might be fairer. And, of course, 'broken' is used as a synonym for "Imbalanced" (Again, 3e pulled out all the stops there, too.)  The innate, quantifiable class imbalance of 3.5 is arguably the high point in a game notable for high degrees of class imbalance, but TSR editions were so... muddy in presentation and varied in implementation it's hard to say for sure whether they were a little worse or a lot better.  Old-school balance was a balance of extremes, casters got lots of very powerful spells, eventually, but were extremely fragile, and getting a spell off successfully was a substantive undertaking.  How that shook out varied.  A tightly-reigned in AD&D campaign, with plenty of the right kind of magic items could see fair balance among classes, and if gave it credit for balance across a range of levels, maybe moreso. Oh, magic items were all over AD&D, yeah. Those treasure types and random tables, sure, you ended up with bushels of +1 swords and potions and protection scrolls, because the tables were weighted to weaker items, and to items of most use to Fighters &c, while wizardly items were comparatively rare (compared to the soon dirt-common +1 this that and theotherthing).5e's magic-item independence does serve to make casters - and, that's every class and almost every sub-class - that much more critically important, though.5e does make an attempt at balancing overall damage over that 6-8 encounter day, yes.  OTOH, the amount of damage a magic-user could absorb was quite low compared to a 5e wizard, d4 HD, CON bonus topping out at +2, HD topping out at 11, vs d6 HD, 20 of 'em, and CON bonus up to +5.   The beefiest possible 1e magic-user, at 20th level, would have 75 hps (0.000095367% chance of rolling all those 4s). A fairly average 14 CON wizard would have over 100, and could with comparably improbable HD rolls, flirt with 200.I think comparing level to level is fair, even though you'd likely advance much, much slower through those high levels in 1e. Me neither.  As long as D&D is committed to maintaining the relative feel of the Big 4, rough single-target DPR parity over long days is the best that could be shot(npi) for.In terms of single-target DPR, only.  Blow up a few hordes of enemies, and it's a different story.   And of course, the wizard's versatility is unmatched, thanks to neo-Vancian prep-and-cast-spontaneously.</blockquote>

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