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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6959102" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I can answer part of your question: "being better than everyone else" is not part of the fun for me.For me, the core of the fun lies in exploring a complex web of interconnecting constraints with meaningful differentiation, and finding points which are locally or globally optimal. It's a form of constraint solving (a creative exercise). In fact, powergaming for me is mostly a solitary exercise--in actual play, I powergame to an extent automatically (I instinctively avoid Witch Bolt for example) but I don't want to take the spotlight off other people so I wind up e.g. building a truly excellent support character who enables others to function well (bardlock) but can also step in and save the day when everyone else is down and out. Spotlight is primarily a social thing, more about letting other human beings declare decisions to the DM than about the mechanical effectiveness of a PC, but there is also a mechanical aspect to it which I avoid. (Giving mechanically-effective characters a detached personality which makes them willing to hold back is one way I try to split the difference.)Nevertheless. Finding brokenly strong combinations is indeed part of the fun for me, whether or not I actually spend time in play exploiting those broken combinations as a power fantasy. In an ideal game, there are lots of variations and almost every class is amazing in its own way: think Master of Magic here, and how there's some kind of amazing 11-book strategy for every school of magic. 5E is pretty good from this perspective because you can build amazing Champions and amazing Rogues and amazing Wizards. They're not all amazing to the same degree or in the same way, but they're all amazing and interesting. Another example of this kind of game is Master of Orion (the original), where your randomly-generated tech tree practically guarantees that every game will have some way to beat the pants off the computer, but the strategy you used last game probably won't be an option this time around. The opposite of this paradigm is a game like Galactic Civilization where the choices you make are basically just rock-scissors-paper up different-but-similar tech trees. GalCiv was written this way so that it would be possible to write intelligent AI opponents, but a side effect is that the actual game is uninteresting to people like me. There aren't any meaningful choices.Dave2008, I used an example earlier w/ blunt weapons vs. piercing weapons, and you denied that that was the effect you were going for, and implied that ranged vs. melee specialization was more what you were going for instead. I don't see a distinction though. I suspect that any system you found balanced would look boringly simplistic to me, just at a higher level of abstraction. If 50% of the monsters you meet are kitable with ranged attacks and 50% require melee attacks to kill, I'll suss that out pretty quick even if you hide it beneath layers of math and indirect rules. Then one of two things will be true. Either:(1) There will still be a mix of ranged and melee PCs which (locally or globally) meaningfully optimizes a party's tactical options to allow them to beat the enemy more effectively than a party which doesn't plan for those tactics in advance; OR(2) All mixes of builds are equally effective, and the only interesting decision points occur during the game itself.#2 isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make complex chargen seem kind of pointless.What this adds up to is that I'm highly skeptical that you could build a game which would seem balanced to you, and seem balanced (non-exploitable) to me, and also have fun and interesting chargen choices (to me).Case in point: As GURPS 4E progressed, it moved more and more towards an effects-based point-buy system designed to ensure that no matter how a given effect (like damage) was produced, it cost the same number of build points. Instead of multiple psychic disciplines wherein e.g. psychokinesis is better at ripping monster's heads off but psychometabolism is better at turning you into animals that could rip people's heads off (which has benefits and drawbacks compared to the direct approach), it became more of a system where "ripping heads off" was a power that just cost X points, and the details of how it happened were considered unimportant fluff.Some people love that kind of thing. I hate it, and it's one of the key things that got me started looking again nostalgically at AD&D's system of classes and levels, which eventually turned into giving 5E a chance. Constraint-solving is interesting.</blockquote>

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