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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Texicles" data-source="post: 6240169" data-attributes="member: 6694608">So, are you saying you (or if not you then the hypothetical anti-balance position) feel balance is bad because historically, others may (or may not) have said as much at varying points in D&D's history? If so, where does the correlation (X edition is balanced and people don't like it) become causation (people don't like X edition because it's balanced)? I'm not trying to call you out, just trying to get a handle on why people take the stances they do. I with you, though I think you're giving a little too much credit to some of the anti-balance crowd in this thread et al. When I framed my previous post, I very intentionally left out the distinct level of balance (encounter vs session or campaign) because I actually would like to see a... erm, balance... between those things, however, I've seen lots of characterization of my position - balance is good - as demanding some level of numerical parity in combat and only combat that has frankly, never existed in any edition.I'm actually for a reasonable level of combat balance. Can't remember who said it, or in which of these threads, but I like it and will paraphrase it here. Using the maligned metric of DPR (which I'll reiterate is NOT my chief concern in playing the game, but it's useful to illustrate a ratio), I'd like to see, ceteris paribus, the most optimized damage dealer do roughly twice the damage of the skill monkey, with a 10-15% deviation for skilled play. That is, of course, assuming that the PCs in question are designed to deal damage in combat. PCs designed to be horrific at fighting, as well as the "white mage," etc. are obvious exceptions that I believe should be perfectly doable in an ideal system. Furthermore, this is intended as an average, not some hard and fast rule that I feel must apply to every encounter ever. Sometimes, an encounter where a particular PC is rendered useless in combat is fine by me, but those instances should be meaningful and uncommon.Outside of combat, I'm all for the "moving spotlight" paradigm, so long as that spotlight can reasonably be expected to shine on PCs with some frequency. Again, this is assuming that PCs are built to do things out of combat. The aforementioned optimized damage dealer can't be expected to contribute much outside of stabby/smashy, and that's fine by me as well.Really, what I want to see is the above (IMO) ideals, applied to a new player rolling a new PC with little to no help from an experienced player. I believe that the game should lend itself to creating a character that doesn't suck nor dominate at any of the three pillars, individually or as a whole, without intentionally doing so. To me, that's the balance I'm looking for.Jeez, thanks for getting me on a tangent Dausuul! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I never intended to talk about what I want, just try to understand the "opposition" as 'twere.Which brings me back to that. Something I'm still having trouble with is the concept of bringing in any edition into the value debate of balance. If people want to discuss the merits of balance as a concept, that's awesome, count me as pro-balance (as described above). But I can't get behind characterizing an entire game system comprising a specific edition of D&D as good or bad because of balance. Yes, I recognize that different editions placed different premiums on balance, and implemented balance in different ways, but to distill any edition down to its level of balance and apply one's valuation of balance to any edition, or to do the inverse and apply one's opinion of an entire edition to the valuation of balance, strikes me as either poor argumentation or dishonest discussion. If the value of balance as a game design concept is what we want to debate, we should probably divest ourselves from the baggage of previous editions, not to mention the fact that there's much more to any edition than its level of balance (real or perceived). If on the other hand, what we want to do is have an edition war under the auspices of a discussion on balance... yuck.</blockquote>

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