Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zinovia" data-source="post: 5495914" data-attributes="member: 57373">Balance is a dirty word to some gamers, and the Holy Grail to others.  To some it means artificial restrictions on character choice, and to others it means you can play in an adventure and know that each character will have something meaningful to contribute to the success of the party.  The goal of balance is to prevent one character from being best at everything, and it is generally accomplished by restricting options.  Advocates of free choice prefer access to all options so they can build the exact nuanced character they envisioned, even if that character is ineffective.Eliminating character classes doesn't guarantee freedom of choice when building a character.  Most point buy systems have skill trees or increase the cost of learning successively higher ranks of the same skill.  Before you can throw fireballs you first have to learn to ignite flammable material, then to throw a fire dart.  To get the next rank in hacking costs more than it did to learn the previous one.  These restrictions are both there to ensure that you have to invest a lot of points in something to excel at it.  Point buy games rarely allow complete freedom of choice, and certainly they don't reward spending points willy nilly on whatever strikes your fancy.  The apparent freedom of choice is an illusion.  Players with mastery of that system will know that you are usually better off focusing on a limited number of skills, rather than widely scattering skill points.  They also know where the investment of points in a narrow focus stops being worth it, and when they should diversify.  Inexperienced players may wind up making ineffective characters without a strong focus, or else focus too narrowly and "waste" points that could have been spent more effectively elsewhere.  It takes more understanding of the system to make a balanced character than it does in a class-based system.Whether or not to use a class-based or point buy system comes down to the type of game you are playing.  Modern and futuristic games do better with point buy.  Classes are harder to define in those game settings.  Although strong archetypes may exist, they won't encompass all the valid character concepts.  What class is a legal secretary with a black belt in Taekwondo, or an ex-football player who likes to fix cars?  On the other hand, I believe fantasy games do better with class-based mechanics.  The archetypes in that genre are much stronger.  Spells are usually assigned based on class, and can have very different flavor because of that.  Class gives you a pre-defined cohesive package of abilities that fits well into the setting and helps ensure balance.  I tried GURPS fantasy for a year, and disliked it compared to both D&D and Rolemaster.  Champions was good for building superheroes, but I don't like it for fantasy.  The feel of a game is always tied to the system mechanics, and therefore I don't believe there is such a thing as a universal system.  Classes for fantasy, point buy for most everything else.</blockquote>

Verification