NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6964345" data-attributes="member: 5834">You ask for the impossible. I believe this was already attempted in 4E where each power was only slightly differentiated by flavor text from other class abilities, but essentially did the same thing for the same damage. I found that model utterly boring.You have to understand why powergaming is what it is. There is a certain subset of players that care for absolutely nothing but combat. They disengage or don't even want to play if a campaign is not heavily combat focused. Very few people care if you're powergaming social or non-combat abilities because they could care less about the outcome of non-combat events even if the DM tries his best to make them important to the campaign. They would rather not even play if the game is not focused on combat. They will find something else to do like playing a video game or watching a movie rather than engage a social encounter or non-combat encounter in D&D. I don't know what specific percentage this is, but based on my experience I would put it in the 70 to 80% range of players that prefer combat over all other aspects of the game.A powergamer does not want someone else to do what he does as well as he does it. It would be unsatisfying to both powergamer 1 and powergamer 2 if they were doing the exact same damage, even if one was doing it with magic and the other with a sword. They would feel like they weren't unique. Most powergamers want to feel powerful and unique. It's a huge reason they do what they do. It's not enough to just be powerful, it has to be uniquely powerful. If everyone around the table made exactly the same optimized character (same class, same abilities, same customization options), the other powergamers would choose different options just to be unique, yet seek to optimize those options to the best of their ability. To answer your question, no, I do not think that reskinning equally effective options would satisfy powergamers. They want to be uniquely powerful. That means doing more damage or something vastly better, while being uniquely powerful in a way the other players can't match. That's what feeds the eqo of powergamers. They want to standout in the group. They want to be the most powerful and effective in combat. They want to feel empowered in a way they can't in the real world. I don't think there is a good way to balance that in an RPG, especially a tabletop RPG.I would prefer they spend more time focusing on other aspects of the game like enemy design to match the power levels of high-level characters. I would love D&D to finally make a game that worked past level 10 or so without so much modification.</blockquote>

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