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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaltab" data-source="post: 6285843" data-attributes="member: 6775806">From all my experience point buy systems are incredibly difficult to get right. It's far more difficult, if not impossible, to really balance characters when there are virtually infinite combinations of possibilities. Even the best of them run into this problem. I mean that's one of the primary reasons why 4th Edition made multiclassing as limited as it was: we saw what free and open Multiclassing did to the game in 3E and it was not pretty. Granted, 4th's multiclassing left a lot to be desired, but each class was functional enough and diverse enough within itself (save for a few, like Vampire) that you could easily make the archetype you wanted, within reason. Now, strict balance is not that neccesary in a less crunchy game. Mutants and Masterminds works in part because superhero games tend to be less about combat crunch and more about creative problem-solving. Even if your Green Arrow-knockoff can't do anything to damage Doomsday, he can still perform other key functions like crowd control, or using his arrows as signals to other parties.In D&D, though, most of the time if a party member isn't contributing to the main problem--whether that be a monster, a skill challenge, a social confrontation, or whatever--then they're not really doing anything. They're just there. Classes and niche protection ensure that no character is useless in a given scenario: that is the advantage of class-based design. It makes specialization the default so that no character, through player inexperience or poor DM planning, ends up being a jack of all trades.</blockquote>

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