Colin McComb's disowning of PHBR8 The Complete Book of Elves?

[Al'Kelhar]

Oh, you mean PrCs by another name...

I was, of course, being strictly tongue-in-cheek. It's good people have their flame sensors tuned to "mild outrage" today ;-)

 

[Hardhead]

I remember one Skills and Powers game we ran. I played a cleric (who had a fighter THAC0 and weapon specialization). A firend used some kit form the Complete Book of Elves. My character kicked his character's butt.

 

[Orius]

I guess his apology stemmed from the relentless assault upon the book on the Internet.

Seriously though, one of the biggest problems with kits was that they used strictly role-playing disadvantges to balance what were essentially non-role-playign advantages. If you've got an RP-light game, those kits would be heavily imbalanced.

 

[rounser]

That's still tapping from your resource pool, not "deficit spending" by tacking on attitude problems to "pay the price."

I think you're concentrating only on the "balance advantage with roleplaying" thing. How is cashing in class abilities which you already have by joining said class "deficit spending"? And you're implying that the whole concept of kits implies that they have to balance advantages with roleplaying restrictions, which is not how I remember them.

But at least in the case of PrCs, this brokeness isn't built into the concept.

I think you're blurring concepts of bad implementation with a bad design structure there...

...And I'd be surprised to learn if we're disagreed on one thing in particular...that PrCs and Kits alike are sort of like communism...the idea is fine in theory, but across a range of designers, inevitably the implementation is often imperfect, sometimes even rotten. The successor to PrCs and Kits would probably benefit from some checks and balances, but even that would be abuseable (in the same way certain combinations of feats can be much more synergistic than others, and all feats are far from equal). More player customisation options = more unbalanced design and abuseable rules (even if it's only by comparison with benchmarks)...I think that's inevitable.

 

[Psion]

How is cashing in class abilities which you already have by joining said class "deficit spending"?

It's not.

And you're implying that the whole concept of kits implies that they have to balance advantages with roleplaying restrictions, which is not how I remember them.

I never said it had to be uniquely roleplaying. But having an advantage an a disadvantage with (usually) 1 or more bonus proficiecies was the basic structure of kits. Only a few later books choose to read disadvantage as taking away class abilities. Those later kits were the first step towards the more sensible PrC.


Sure, you can goof either one up. But in the case of kits, the approach itself was flawed.