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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6245488" data-attributes="member: 87792">Your finger might point that way - but mine points in a different direction entirely.  Gary Gygax was a wargamer running for a group of wargamers.  They'd have happily driven a coach and horses through any possible balance issues where things were too strong (and I believe on several occasions did).  oD&D was a decently balanced system, as was 1e.  It wasn't perfect - but generally things were too weak rather than too strong (in particular the thief needed certain assumptions to be used, and the fighter had too much playtesting by Rob Kuntz so was weak - Gygax himself on these boards said that the powerful options in Unearthed Arcana were to balance the fighter).After 1985 and Gygax was forced out, things went downhill - but not fast.  The foundations Gygax put in place remained unchanged even in 2e.  Which meant that the biggest things that broke 2e were normally kits and spells.  But the foundations were solid because they remained from when the core of D&D was playtested by a group every bit as ferocious at exploiting balance issues as the Character Optimisation boards.Then Wizards of the Coast produced 3.0.  And in producing 3.0 they managed to remove almost all the restrictions Gygax had placed on the wizard, managed to destroy the item economy that weighted items towards the fighter, managed to badly screw up the saves (which in short meant that the more dangerous the effect the harder it was to apply, weighting the balance to evokers), and removed almost all the other subtle balance tweaks such as the automatic ageing in the hugely powerful Haste spell, and the System Shock checks in Polymorph.</blockquote>

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