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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6187232" data-attributes="member: 42582">You're probably right, but I'm not sure that the existence of min-maxing strategies in PC build is necessarily a good thing. Depending exactly on what is being min-maxed, I guess.It's a bit of a worry if the best way to build a PC who is good at X is not to maximise levels in the class that is badged at being good at X.This resonates very strongly with me. I prefer PC building to be as transparent as possible, with options doing what they say on the tin.I think there're are (at least) two possible ways of cashing out "effective". One is along the lines of "role effectiveness" or "genre effectiveness" - eg per your example of the "barbarian" running around in full plate and a greatsword. But in an RPG where player choices during play are expected to make a difference to the actual unfolding of ingame events (and I think many, perhaps most, D&D games would fit this descriptions), that sort of "genre effectiveness" is only worth having if playing your role also has a correlative impact on the ingame events.This then leads us to a second way of cashing out "effective" - along the lines of "mechancially potent in action resolution". If effectiveness in this sense requires trading away genre/role effectiveness, that's a worry. If achieving effectiveness in this sense, while preserving some approximation to genre/role effectiveness, requires counter-intuitive build paths that rely upon baroque multi-class combinations, that's a worry too. It's also a worry if you can improve mechanical effectiveness, at only a very modest cost to genre/role effectiveness, by taking those baroque combinations.You (Nellisir) have tried to head-off concerns about mechanical effectiveness as a distinct and important category of effectiveness by you remarks about the GM being able to beat any PC, and challenging all the players and giving all the PCs spotlight time. But those strategies only work (I think) in a game which is very heavily GM driven and correspondingly passive on the player side. In a more player driven game, a player who wants his/her PC to be effective in genre terms also needs to have adequate mechanical effectiveness. I don't know if that's what Ahnehnois had in mind, but it's the direction of thought that the quoted post pushed me in.TL;DR: I don't really like what seem to be the system mastery implications of the intersection of the currrent class rules and the current multi-classing rules, which run the risk of forcing a trade-off between mechanical and genre effectiveness.</blockquote>

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