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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9170880" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Tell that to the Cleric. It was literally developed to balance out Sir Fang, the vampire character that was OP.Tell that to the (genuinely clever) idea that heavy armor is an XP penalty you wear for protection: XP=GP means that banking some of your carry weight as armor is an XP penalty, but it makes you more likely to survive. Dare you take the risk? This is a form of game balance. It's certainly balance with a different focus, but it is balance nonetheless.Tell that to the carefully designed random item tables, which specifically favor Fighters, as a counterbalance to the inherent but complicated power of Wizards. Or the XP tables, or the spell interruption rules, or...Gygax cared about making a balanced game. His goals differed from the goals of modern D&D design (as one might expect!). But he wanted to make an effective game for those goals. That required making things which balance against one another, because if there were an exploitable dominant strategy, his players would have exploited it. That's how things were done back then.A well-balanced game offers distinct options which can't be simply subjected to a calculation to determine which is best. Ideally, it offers a huge variety of such choices, but combinatoric explosion usually means that there's a limit to what is feasible to design. So a broad swathe is about the best one can expect.</blockquote>