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Message: <blockquote data-quote="B.T." data-source="post: 5902701" data-attributes="member: 84465">I'm not going to slog through this thread.  Too many pages and posts for me to care.  Instead, I'm going to answer the question posed in the thread title: "Why do these crazy new school players obsess over balance?"  (A slight exaggeration, but sometimes I feel the same way about it even though I started playing with 3.5 and tend to obsess over balance.) The reason is simple.  Many of us come from the post-2e world of feats and classes and trap options.  In 3e, you could easily make a character who sucked by taking the wrong feat or class or spell.  Given that 3.0 was a huge push toward D&D's focus on the combat encounter, combat effectiveness was king.  If you weren't at a certain power level, you were dead weight (or, worse, just dead).  And some of us witnessed this power imbalance and were troubled by it. I'm big on fairness in games.  To me, balance is about fairness.  It's about giving everyone an opportunity to shine.  When the wizard can turn into a dragon and teleport and cast spells completely invalidate the fighter (or eliminate him on a failed Will save), the game isn't fair.  It's not right.  And nerds tend to obsess over things.  Thus, we started obsessing over balance. To answer your question directly--"Why should classes be balanced?"--it's about fairness. 1. I don't want to play in a game where my character is awful because I made a wrong decision at chargen.  I don't want to play in a game where others are punished for making a wrong decision at chargen.  Some exceptions to this exist, but wrong decisions (like Int 9 wizard or 4 Str fighter) in this vein should be glaringly, obviously wrong. 2. I don't want to play in a game where new players are "punished" for not knowing the game.  This goes with #1.  I don't want to have to look over my players' shoulders to ensure they're not gimping themselves by writing "fighter" on their character sheet instead of "cleric." 3. I want relatively balanced encounters.  It's not fun trying to design an encounter for characters with wildly divergent power levels.  Not every encounter needs to be perfectly balanced--some should be an easy victory and others should be very difficult--but if I'm planning an encounter, I'd like to have a roughly even power level for all players.  When one player curbstomps the encounter, it's less fun for me (and the other players, I suspect). 4. I don't want to have to ban or nerf material.  Write me a solid product.  The less makework I have to do, the more time I can devote to playing the game.</blockquote>

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