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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7238995" data-attributes="member: 82106">Meh- It is easy enough, usually, to rank the more straightforward powers. The problem with 'point systems' for ranking powers is they just don't account for various things. It is relatively easy to game such things by negation of disadvantages, or just come up with corner cases that don't work pretty easily.My friends and I, back in the 1980's, developed starship combat. It was basically D&D type combat simplified, with each ship having a facing and turn capacity. There were 100's of different types of weapons, armors, shields, bombs and missiles, and every conceivable thing. Nobody ever managed to create a fully automated point system. My friend was a genius with numerical game engine design. He'd spend 3 weeks working on a point system, and I'd break it in 5 minutes with some crazy counter example (some ship I would design on the spot and proceed to tar him with, though I think he liked to win better than I did, so I lost more of them because I made up some crazy thing just for fun). Anyway, these weapons were actually a LOT like 4e powers, they attacked various kinds of defenses, created effects, caused secondary effects/attacks, imposed conditions, etc. The real issue was there's always some sort of way to push things in a certain direction that is just abnormally useful when combined with other specific things. You need human judgement to gauge the costs, and that was what we finally had in the 'last word' printed version of our game. I simply went through and from the experience of playing 100's or 1000's of battles I simply adjusted the point costs of all the ships on that basis. I think that's how 4e is designed. Powers have a basic expected range of effect, and then they simply cut back damage or used lesser conditions, or did some timing tweak or something, until what they had seemed to match expected values when placed on actual modestly optimized characters. As [MENTION=358]Dalamar[/MENTION] says, with 4e just eyeball it to one of the most vanilla powers.</blockquote>

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