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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5717556" data-attributes="member: 22424">These measures would help, but they won't fix the underlying problem.The fundamental problem is the stacking of options - you use Theme X + race Y + feats A, B and C +... and get the most optimised character possible in a given feature.3e tried to put a cap on this by naming the various bonus types - armour bonus, shield bonus, deflection bonus, enhancement bonus... and then stopping the various types from stacking.4e does much the same thing, except that it typically names the bonuses by &quot;what grants them&quot; rather than some notion of &quot;what they do&quot; - so 4e has racial bonuses, feat bonuses, and so on.However... those stacking rules are gradually degraded with time, as the designers add more and more options to the game. And to a fairly large extent this is deliberate - I forget whether it was in the &quot;Spell Compendium&quot; or the &quot;Rules Compendium&quot; (or online in relation to one of these), but I recall the 3e designers commenting that they'd added a holy bonus type in addition to a sacred bonus type (or something of that sort), because otherwise there would be no point in using the new spell they had introduced in place of an existing spell - if both used the same type they wouldn't stack (so why not use the original), but if they used different types, people would use both.And so, you get more modifiers that can be applied to a given aspect of the character, and which are designed to stack - deliberately circumventing the stacking rules that are intended precisely to prevent this sort of thing!The actual solution is for WotC to decide up-front how many types of bonuses they will have, and how far they want total bonuses to go, and build the game accordingly. Once they reach the point where all these bonuses are fully saturated, they need to have the discipline to accept, &quot;that's it, we're done, the game is complete&quot;. (For financial reasons, of course, they won't actually do this. But they should.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 5717556, member: 22424"] These measures would [i]help[/i], but they won't fix the underlying problem. The fundamental problem is the stacking of options - you use Theme X + race Y + feats A, B and C +... and get the most optimised character possible in a given feature. 3e tried to put a cap on this by naming the various bonus types - armour bonus, shield bonus, deflection bonus, enhancement bonus... and then stopping the various types from stacking. 4e does much the same thing, except that it typically names the bonuses by "what grants them" rather than some notion of "what they do" - so 4e has racial bonuses, feat bonuses, and so on. However... those stacking rules are gradually degraded with time, as the designers add more and more options to the game. And to a fairly large extent this is deliberate - I forget whether it was in the "Spell Compendium" or the "Rules Compendium" (or online in relation to one of these), but I recall the 3e designers commenting that they'd added a [i]holy[/i] bonus type in addition to a [i]sacred[/i] bonus type (or something of that sort), because otherwise there would be no point in using the new spell they had introduced in place of an existing spell - if both used the same type they wouldn't stack (so why not use the original), but if they used different types, people would use both. And so, you get more modifiers that can be applied to a given aspect of the character, and which are designed to stack - deliberately circumventing the stacking rules that are intended precisely to prevent this sort of thing! The [i]actual[/i] solution is for WotC to decide up-front how many types of bonuses they will have, and how far they want total bonuses to go, and build the game accordingly. Once they reach the point where all these bonuses are fully saturated, they need to have the discipline to accept, "that's it, we're done, the game is complete". (For financial reasons, of course, they won't actually do this. But they should.) [/QUOTE]

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