Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
This is more a point about optimization-blindness, which affects everyone in the hobby including the designers. People develop a mental model of 'what playing X game is like' which includes the options that made sense to them, or which fit their sense of the fiction, or which feel fun, etc, and they tend to not include the esoteric stuff that is in the system but which didn't really make itself a part of their experience.

Then a new player enters the group who has a different mental model, different expectations, etc, and suddenly you've got a 'broken character' to deal with.

Zinycor was saying 'AD&D characters are balanced just fine, and no character is particularly more powerful than another'. But that doesn't have to be because AD&D doesn't support massive imbalances between characters, it can just be because Zinycor's experiences didn't include e.g. a Lv1 wizard exploiting the pummel chart rules to trivially win a 1-on-1 melee brawl with the party fighter (actual event from a campaign I was in).

Similarly, you say 'perfect ability scores aren't going to more than double a fighter's power', but lets look at a Lv3 Fighter for example. They've got, what, THAC0 17 from levels, and something like 1d8 or 1d10 damage from their weapon? ACs around 5 are a good ballpark of what you might be trying to hit, so they hit for 5 damage about half of the time (9/20ths really). They probably have no bonuses from Strength since those don't start until 16 (checked). So that's about 2.25 damage a round that they can personally deliver, roughly. Now take that fighter with 18/00 strength. They have -3 THAC0 and +6 damage. That means now they hit 12/20ths of the time, for 11 damage on a hit. That's 6.6 damage a round, or about triple effectiveness from having one optimal attribute. Optimal constitution, dexterity, and gearing choices may mean they don't drop during that first round and so on, but its harder to figure.

I think the reality is a bit harder to see, which is that: despite playing in systems that allow for factors of 4 or factors of 10 or factors of 100 differences in power and ability, that doesn't actually make the games stop being fun. We might say to ourselves 'balance is important, I had fun, therefore it must have been balanced, right?' and be blind to the crazy stuff that the system actually allows in principle.

That campaign where the wizard pummelled the fighter (and later resulted in the party shedding their armor and weapons and punching out a copper hatchling dragon once the group figured out the cheese) was fun, despite the fact that the game was wildly and crazily unbalanced.
That's a very good point