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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5600124" data-attributes="member: 61155">Glad you asked! In my case, I banned expertise feats and am using inherent item bonuses and making a few other house rules as well! With the aim of preventing players from only having one weapon they are good at, and not bothering with anything else, as well as helping to minimize the potential 'gap' that was discussed before.  But, again, it sure would be nice if that burden wasn't on me.   You keep putting things into such extremes. I've said, repeatedly, that no game is perfect - the DM will always have some need to oversee and adjust things. That doesn't change the fact that the less they have to do so, the more they can focus on, say, story and entertainment and fun.  As a DM, coming up with house rules to balance the party and prevent various undesired outcomes (like fancy new magic hammers getting discarded as trash) is not the fun part of the game. It's homework, aimed at getting the game to run in a fashion I think everyone will enjoy.  I'm willing to do it - but that doesn't mean I wouldn't rather the system handled such things on its own. And 4E does, in many ways! It has made many advancements and addressed many problems. This is simply one that I feel has developed, and would be nice for it to be addressed as well.  As far as the talk of players, that's a tricky issue. It generally isn't fun for a player to be told, "Hey, you should intentionally cripple yourself for the good of the group". They can do so, sure. But the problem remains with the system that demands such a concession, not the player who is frustrated by it.   If half the party are super-optimized, and half are not, who is at fault? The optimizers? The other players? The DM? Or the system that allowed that scenario to occur?  You keep putting things in extremes - that this is the only argument being offered, and since you find it incorrect, everything else in the discussion can be easily dismissed.  I agree that you don't need certain feats to be effective. But by higher levels, if the DM is balancing the game towards characters with Expertise and Superior defense feats, a character without those will be at significant disadvantages.  Again, it comes down to the gap. At launch, honestly, the feats were relatively balanced. You couldn't jump ahead of other characters by leaps and bounds. You could still optimized, but being optimized didn't put you out of another character's league.  Over the course of the edition, power creep developed. The Expertise feats were really what emphasized it, and whatever you might feel about them, you cannot deny that they are game mechanically unbalanced with other feats. They are simply more mechanically potent, by a significant degree, than even other useful combat feats.  The current discussion - over what sort of feats to have, or over the potential to have multiple categories of feats, or whatever other solutions are proposed - is looking at ways both that might fix the problem for DMs in the current environment, or could prevent such issues in future environments. You can't deny that the potency of feats has changed over the course of the edition and that the 'gap' between optimized and non-optimized has widened.  You might not feel it is a problem, sure, or that a good DM can address it anyway. But you can't deny that the change has happened.   I don't think you get to declare that. You can say it isn't a problem in your game, sure, or in your experiences. But simply blanket declaring that those who have run into the problem are somehow wrong? Sorry, but I don't think you have the authority to dismiss them like that.  You seem to have this odd impression of the folks in the thread. That they are out to convert folks to a cause or trying to convince people of a problem that you don't think exists. That's not what is going on. They are discussing a problem that they have encountered, and discussing ways to address it. It's you who keeps coming in here and insisting that they are incorrect about it being a problem, and that if it is a problem, its due to their own failings.  Which, again... unhelpful. Not especially constructive. Etc.   I keep repeating myself here, and you keep not acknowledging it. I get that you can handle this. But insisting that an issue shouldn't be addressed, simply because a DM can fix it, doesn't satisfy me. Especially because a "fundamental rewrite of the system" is only one of the possible topics on the table! Look, you mention that they have come farther than in other editions or other games. But by your logic, they should never have done so. By your logic, you should be playing those other games, and just using "a little party teamwork" and "a helpful DM" to handle any disparities.  Did you enjoy doing so, in the past? Given that you aren't playing those games or editions - or so I assume - you must feel that 4E addressing the issue was a good thing.  So why do you feel that continuing to work on the problem, continuing to even discuss it, is somehow problematic?</blockquote>

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