As a writer and designer, please don’t let me ever imply that the perfect balance of any two competing priorities is easy, but especially Story and Gameplay. Since design critique is also the main thing I do here on Tribality, I’m always in danger of implying that perfection is easy, or even deluding myself into such an idea.

You can see how difficult that balance can be in how 5e struggled to give us a Cavalier subclass.

The strongest offerings, I think, are where those can meet in the middle – where a clear story meets a new and different gameplay loop that appropriately signifies that story. Sure, it’s also nice to have something that easily receives whatever story you want to give it, and you don’t want a class’s or subclass’s story to be too narrow.

Of course, you inevitably inject some of the former into the latter when you start to give them mechanical abilities which support their narrative flavor.