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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6845686" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure, but now you're on the road to a 'mutation' of 4e, and not really a clone. Once you develop a 'mix-n-match' power attribute point value system, then you'll quickly find that this drives things in directions that 4e doesn't go. Frankly I do not believe that there is ANY possible point system you can make that will produce something close to the powers of 4e, not THAT close. I spent YEARS husbanding our game clubs mass space combat system, which was all heavily point buy, and I can tell you, there's no such thing as a universal point buy system. Synergies are just too powerful. Something that is worthless in one context is utterly dominant in another. If you make its cost defined only by its most effective use, then in effect it and all the things that it goes together with to create that context become one single logical option, you can't afford to split them up. If you price it based on its general utility in a wide variety of situations, then you still have this one dominant use as a single logical option, because nobody can afford to pass it up at such a cheap price.4e, as it is, is REASONABLY balanced, simply because any option that is TOO troublesome has never been published (well, some have, but they generally at least got errataed out of existence). Another thing that balances 4e is the prevention of infinite permutations, you can't combine just anything together, or if you can manage to combine several elements then ability score requirements or just sheer feat cost and other opportunity costs brings it into line. A point-buy power system would have none of those constraints. You could TRY to design in 'general constraints' (IE fighter powers have to use only this subset of all options, and they can't combine them in ways that diverge from the fighter/defender/martial 'theme', but who decides that).I'm not saying a group of people couldn't play that game, but it would be a lot like 3.5 IMHO, it would be VERY breakable and only restrained table rules would keep it playable (or it would turn into an extreme munchkin-land version of 4e). Now, maybe you can devise ways to tweak conditions, effects, and other material such as to better accommodate that sort of design. There ARE fairly viable point-based games out there, and powers still 'slot in' to a limited part of 4e, so it wouldn't seem perhaps impossible to do that, but you'd have had to revisit EVERY aspect of the game. Again, it seems like you can't get closer to 4e than making a 'mutant', even if you WANT to clone it!</blockquote>

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