Why does the party need to be balanced?

[Quertus]

That would be why I generally tend to dismiss the "GM will fix it!" arguments. GMing is a hard enough job at the best of times; having to make sure the party isn't woefully out of balance just makes it harder.

As far as the "but people still play D&D argument goes"... D&D has a market presence and power beyond anything any other game can match. It's the first game people are likely to hear about, the most commonplace one in stores and by far the easiest to find games for. It doesn't need to be the best, it just has to be good enough. Using "but people play it" as an argument is frankly almost dishonest and it irritates me that it always gets rolled out eventually.

It's similar with the "diversity" argument. D&D has never, in any of its incarnations, been diverse. It's always been highly restrictive, simply due to using classes and levels - but not just that, because 3E in particular absolutely delights in telling players "no" at every turn. What it does have is, again, a mountain of material that few other systems can match. So it achieves diversity by volume, because you're likely to find something that works. If you can afford all of those books and the time to pore over them, that is. And if you wanted to play a martial character at high levels before ToB came out (I think in 2007)... tough luck.

To expand a bit on Morty's points...


And even if GMing were really easy, each minute spent trying to fix a broken system is a minute not spent creating a cool campaign or, you know... actually GMing.

Not to mention that people playing a game doesn't mean that game isn't poorly designed, or that it wouldn't have more players and/or be more enjoyable to the ones it has if were better designed.

Not only that, is extremely easy to add unbalanced options to a balanced game. I mentioned this quite often already, but even if every class in 3.5 were perfectly balanced, it'd still be possible (and really easy) to have Thor and Hawkeye in the same team. Just make the two character at different levels, with different loot and different templates. The only difference is that it'd actually be honest to the players.

For point #1, "GM will fix it" - forget that! In 3e, with its breadth of content, the players will fix it. The group sets a balance range, the group balances to that range. The GM should rarely if ever get involved.

For point #2, "people still play it" - … well, I agree that one cannot necessarily draw universal conclusions from such data. I can only anecdotally say that I still play it, and give my reasons why. Is 3e poorly designed? At times, sure (Truenamer). But it is (accidentally) brilliantly designed to give the players maximum agency to create characters at whatever balance point they desire. That, and the (often less fixable) failings of many other systems, are among the reasons I continue to play 3e.

For point #3, "diversity" - well, I don't actually get your drift. I can say that my group was playing rocking martials through epic level as of, well, whenever the Epic Level Handbook came out.

For point #3b, "Thor and Hawkeye through divergent loot/level" - IME, that is a bandaid, and a poor one. Gold is a river, XP is a river. Hawkeye will catch up, to the point where he doesn't feel like Hawkeye, and/or Thor doesn't feel like Thor anymore. IME, the players need the full build control offered by 3e to make characters who remain Thor and Hawkeye. When I tried this technique, I actually had to have my "Hawkeye" a) leave the party for a few levels, and b) give away much of his loot before he returned. It would have been a lot of work for the GM to get them to fix it for me, so I found excuses to handle it in character.

One thing I haven't tried is giving everyone infinite free (no LA) templates. Then "Hawkeye" takes no templates, while "Thor" takes lots. Perhaps in this scenario, "Hawkeye" never catches up?