Game Balance

Another short ranting post I made on the forums that I wish to save, this one in response to a thread where someone claimed 'Game Balance Is A Myth'. Here goes:

Game balance is sort of a nebulous ideal. You're never going to achieve it with a game system, at least not perfectly, but that doesn't make it a bad thing to strive for.

If a typical group of players with a typical game master (based on your target audience for the game) would enjoy your game with minimal problems, you're probably good. It's not so much that balance makes the experience better as certain kinds of imbalance can make the typical experience worse. The plight of the poor newbie that plays a fighter in 3e D&D, expecting to contribute meaningfully to epic battles against dragons and such, is a good example of the problem imbalance can cause.

However!

I think it's more important that the game designers understand and explain the balance and relative capabilities of things, and make them explicit, than that everything be balanced against each other. There's a significant difference between 'this character type is better because that's how the setting works' (Solars in Exalted, for instance) and 'this character type is better because of miscalculations by the game designers' (Clerics in 3e D&D). When people complain about poor balance, they are almost always complaining about the latter sort of problem -- relative power assumptions by the game designers that don't bear out in play because of poor game design.