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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 6237939" data-attributes="member: 40398">I've had a similar experience: Pretty much everyone cares about balance to some degree or another. I've only known one player in all my years of gaming who seemed to sacrifice everything for character concept. And I think it's interesting to note, though, that he was not a D&Der; his game of choice was a hard scifi rpg, which he would have undoubtedly played every day instead of D&D if he could find a group really interested in that rpg. I’ve known him to actually sigh and roll his eyes at D&Disms of every edition, which makes sense to me because D&D has always been pretty gamey.I've had a different experience. Pretty much everyone cares about encounter balance; some more, some less. New players may not be familiar with terms like DPR, and most of them don’t regularly compare damage totals to find out who can do the most. But they’re not stupid; they know when one character is conspicuously under- or over-powered, as TerraDave says. And with a single exception, I’ve never met a player who’s 100% hunky-dorey with certain characters consistently contributing more or less to the game than others, and to combat in particular. Nobody (with one exception) ever felt 100% okay after realizing that “Gee, my character sucks because I wanted to play [cool-looking concept that actually sucks in play]!”Oh, and very few of the gamers I’ve known post on D&D forums, ever.So naturally, when some ‘net poster claims to have never met anyone who cares about balance in 27 years of gaming, I can’t help but suspect that there’s more to the situation than meets the eye. Even if you’re not consciously doing so, you’re probably selecting people to game with who’re likely to care less about balance via your choice of edition/clone, and via personal relationships. There are also probably players who gamed with you for a short while, and then left for unspecified or misleading reasons rather than telling you “I want a more balanced game!" Then of course there’s confirmation bias, and probably a certain degree of innocent forgetfulness when it comes to the occasional instance where game imbalance causes a player at your table to frown or have a poor game night.That said, I hope that 5e throws balance out the window. That way I won’t even be tempted to waste money on it.</blockquote>

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