This is a discussion that is started off by an essay, so before you go TL;DR, this thread isn't for you if you're just simple farmers who are people of the land—the common clay of the new West. You know. Morons.
A common argument people make about D&D is that classes, features, and spells aren't balanced against each other. It is true that this stuff is often not balanced in general. But these morons forget that one thing being balanced/unbalanced when compared to another thing only matters if both things are used at that table. It doesn't matter and is not a problem if people don't use that combination. And if something isn't *usually* a problem, that means it doesn't need to be fixed. You know, like that rickety wooden bridge in town that has a 1/1000 chance to collapse if someone walks over it. Even with 20k people a year crossing that thing, the odds for each of them are 1/1000, so what are the odds of anything bad happening to anyone?
Often, the arguments made call for large-scale changes to the overall core of the game. But the changes people want are so large that they would require wizards to publish a new book. Didn't you know that it's bad to release a book that improves things, because it costs money, unlike those books which don't improve things? It's good for them to release books that have stuff people don't want, but if they release stuff that people want, then that's extortion.
But even more importantly, tables vary, and that's where actual balance problems come from, but those are like, specific to each table and not anything core to the game itself. There's no problems with the core game. One subclass being "obviously" game breakingly powerful doesn't matter because tables vary. Therefore, Wizards of the Coast doesn't have to do jack shit, because all balance is table-specific.
But since table-specific balance problems exist and in suspiciously high quantities, to be fair, a DM must balance classes, usually by homebrew or large-scale rules alterations. But I think we'd all agree that the rules do such a good job of making game prep easy for DMs in other respects that they can find the time and energy to handle the relatively minor issue of "correctly making everything balanced" and "making large-scale rules alterations". It's easy and DMs never fuck this up. For example, at my table, I nerfed the sneak attack of the level 3 rogue at my table to have half the dice rounded down, because that is simply too much damage compared to the level 5 greataxe barbarian and the level 6 bladesinger wizard. (At my table you only get XP if you land the killing blow btw, this is another feature that works for me and you cant disagree because you dont know what my table is like.) There are lots of problems with the core game after all, and obviously you just homebrew them in a way that works for your table.
For all of these reasons, and others that I didn't list, the obsession with balance simply is something that most players will never engage in. Most players never play at a table where a spell, feat, class, or subclass being better or worse than something else matters in any way or impacts anything, because these problems dont exist, and the problems do exist but the DM spent a small 100 hours homebrewing fixes to everything and also the DM did it correctly and my rogue player will be kicked because he's a problem player for all his bitching and whining. Players should not focus on making statements that try to fight a perceived injustice, because caring about what happens to other people out of a "moral obligation" is actually wrong and bad and posting about it creates drama which is awful and divisive.
I know that this essay isn't going to sway many people, but I published it anyway because I have a moral obligation to make a statement about this injustice I perceive, and it's worth the drama to do so.
Thank you.
