As irrelevant as your experience or opinion on the matter.
No. You do not agree. You think nearly everyone agrees with you. You have no evidence to support this claim.
I think most people do and you have no evidence to support the claim they don't.
I can only craft my position about what I believe to be the case.
Stop being insulting. I have asked you nicely before. Please stop.
I am not trying to insult anyone, but find it to be a double standard asking me to prove my beliefs and explicitly calling me wrong while offering nothing in terms of proof for your own unsupported claims.
I believe you are wrong.
I already provided the evidence for my
BELIEF above in multiple posts, it is my experience at the table.
Show your evidence that I am "wrong" please. You did not say you believe I am wrong, you stated I am wrong above. Why didn't that statement come with the evidence?
No it is not. It is explicitly not. The books say, the developers say, the marketing says, over and over, that this is a game of peers, not a game of casters and caddies.
The players are peers, not the characters and what the developers and marketing say does not "prove" anything.
I don't know if the broad statements from some designers are only a subset of designers, or if they are pandering, or if they only intend it to apply to specific levels/situations, or if they don't understand the rules they wrote, or if as Mike Mearls wrote that it only applies to a specific platonic ideal of a campaign.
What I do know for a fact is the designers are the people who wrote Simulacrum and Wish, enabling casters with these spells to replicate virtually every ability from every other class. So while you, and maybe even they, claim they designed the classes to be balanced, in fact what they wrote into the rules ensures they won't be balanced.
Then prove it, rather than simply dismissing everything anyone who disagrees with you has to say with "nope, the silent majority is with me!"
I believe the majority is with me. I never said they were silent.
You believe they aren't. That is fine, but your belief does not prove that I am wrong.
...are you serious? You're going to act like your anecdotes have any value at all in this discussion? Seriously?
They have value to me. What are you providing to prop up your position?
At least I have anecdotes. You have offered no proof, no anecdotal evidence and really no logic to support your position, which you actually state as fact.
No. You have not stated it as a belief. You have repeatedly stated things as though they are facts. That the silent majority agrees with you, for example.
I am not trying to insult you, but as a point of fact you are not telling the truth. Here is the exact quote on post 42:
"It would be capitulation to what I believe to be a very small minority of players that want to play characters that are extremely powerful but for some reason refuse to play the classes that are designed and intended for that role."
Please respect me when you are talking about what I said and did not say and don't claim I did not say what I did say.
This, for example, is not stated as a belief. But it is one--and a false one at that.
"Equals" does not mean "absolutely 100% identical in every possible way." You and I are equals before the law, even though I am not perfectly interchangeable with you. Equals--peers--can be dramatically different but still afforded the same rights, privileges, etc.
Equals means:
being the same in quantity, size, degree, or value.
That is the definition I was using and will never be the case with two different PCs in play.
People can be "peers" while one is better than the other and in a team game you can be very successful without being equals. Jalen Hurts and Kenny Picket are peers. Both are Football players. Both play the same position on the same team, and both do their part so the Eagles can win at football. They are teamates, they are Superbowl champions, they are peers, but they are not equals.
Nnnnnnnnope! That is objectively false.
Ok then prove it. You asked me repeatedly to show proof of my beliefs. I want you to show proof of something you say is objectively false.
You claiming it is objectively false does not mean it is actually objectively false.
And no, being actively biased against popular player preferences is not good for the game
I don't think it it is against popular player preferences. I think it is with popular player preferences.
You keep asking me for proof. Prove that it is against popular player preferences please. If you can't prove it please admit it is your unsupported belief and you have no proof.
You have the nerve to accuse me of insulting you, while you ask me to prove my beliefs and state your position as fact and offer no proof or even anecdotal evidence to support it.
But that's exactly what you are advocating for. You are advocating for casters who rule the roost. Casters who denigrate (I assume that's the word you meant?) others, namely martials, and martials who are happy to be so denigrated.
No I am not. I have never seen a caster denigrate a non-caster (or anyone for that matter) in play and that would not be welcome at any of the tables I play at.
You keep saying that the game was designed with a particular intent, that you have somehow divined from looking at the rules.
Yes from the mechanics.
Why not, instead, look at...the things the designers explicitly tell us?
Statements are not proof as you keep telling me here and I don't even have a specific or explicit statement here, just a vague reference to what they tell us..
The mechanics ensure casters are more powerful than non-casters and those mechanics were written by the designers.
Or is it because those explicit, repeated, consistent statements from the designers poke holes in your "beliefs"?
No, it is because the mechanics they also wrote poke holes in these statements you keep talking about but haven't actually specifically provided for reference.
I want to be just as important to the party's success as any other participant. That's what being on a team means. That's why we have the phrase "there's no I in team". Teamwork and joint effort. Promoting inclusion, equanimity.
That is what YOU want. That is why this is a problem for YOU.
I don't believe it is what most players want and that is why I don't believe it is a problem for most players.
That's not what you said. You have argued--repeatedly and consistently--that not only DO the rules do this, not only SHOULD the rules do this, but the designers explicitly WANT the rules to do this.
Please use the words I actually said instead of trying to reframe or paraphrase them. I think you repeatedly twist the meaning of what I type, perhaps unintentionally.
What I said is the classes were
"designed and intended" to be imbalanced. You offered no proof that is not the case.
You are also oversimplifying the designers goals with respect to balance and offering no actual specific citations for context or nuance. Mike Mearls, one of the chief designers for 5E wrote a several thousand word essay on balance. It is by far the largest and most complete single disucssion of balance that I have read from any D&D designer. I don't agree with everything in that essay, but here are a few exerps relevant to this discussion:
"There are also plenty of players and DMs who have no use for game balance. If things are out of whack, their playstyle is such that it doesn't matter. Who cares if the berserker can kick anything's ass in melee, if the campaign is a mash-up of Romeo and Juliet crossed with The Longest Yard. Fighting isn't the point, so all those unbalanced fighting abilities the berserker uses don't matter."
"A lot of gamers really don't care about game balance, and that's OK. "
"For some people, wizard spells that obviated skills were bad because they replaced rogues in those critical situations where the rogue had a chance to shine. Others didn't care, or rarely had rogues in the party, or had enough chances for the rogue to shine that the wizard didn't steal them all."
"In a way, though, game balance has to draw lines and partition things. Game balance exists at least in part within the context of a specific campaign. When you try to balance the game, you have to create a sort of platonic ideal of a campaign and work from there. Do some people think it's cool that wizard spells make skills worthless? Sure, but that might not be the baseline you design to."
Now none of that is "proof", but if you take his statements as truthful it is clear that the chief designer for 5E
believed many players do not care about balance.
