Quote Originally Posted by Zeful View Post
Balance does not mean every single option is mathematically equal, which is something people who complain about people that want balance do not understand.

Balance as part of game design is little more than making every option's difference in power fully intentional. One option being more powerful than another does not a bad, or even unbalanced game make. One option being more powerful than most options, and only because the people that wrote it didn't realize the option would be the best by a large margin. That's bad, unbalanced game design, and it hurts the game far more than it helps.
I disagree on two points; first, I don't think intention matters in whether something is balanced or not (otherwise 3.5's Toughness would totally be a balanced choice), and second, balance is actually better defined as "equal power, equal cost": that is, there is some sort of fair cost for everything, and it is proportional to the effectiveness of the option. Whether that cost is character points, XP, levels, feats, magic item slots, gp, spell slots, or something more exotic is not important; the important thing is that there is a fair exchange rate. (This is complicated extraordinarily by the use of multiple exchange rates in the same system, such as levels, feats, magic item slots, gp, spells, and so forth, with inefficient conversions between.)

Importantly, balance does not rely on equality of options; instead, it relies on more effective options costing more, in some meaningful sense.

And, as I previously stated, perfect costing is not only extremely difficult, it's not very fun for players who enjoy optimizing. Therefore, a certain proportion of "discounted options" is reasonable. (Just like in life, where it's possible to buy groceries with nothing but coupons if you spend enough time optimizing them.) Imbalance becomes problematic, however, when there is an enormous difference in resulting effectiveness; consider a family that rose to wealth and influence by clipping coupons, and how absurd that would be.

Quote Originally Posted by Craft (Cheese) View Post
Actually, I would argue it's your choices in play where system mastery should matter, not your choices during character creation before play even starts.
That's a matter of preference, I believe; I don't know of any solid line of reasoning why one or the other style is always strictly superior.