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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5244887" data-attributes="member: 996">One of the universal constants of RPG lines is power inflation.   4e has been suffering a bit less power inflation than you'd expect from the volume of material produced in 2 years.  There are a couple of good reasons.  First and foremost is the willingness to issue errata (albeit, not the willingness to /call/ it errata).  If you're willing to nerf the broken rule you let slip out to make a dead line, at least it only screws the game up for a little while.Second, the use of keyword-linked mechanics allows one rule (like, say, the 'restrained' condition) be used to model a variety of PC and monster abilities and magic items.  You don't need every monster with a tentacle or web attack and every magic net and rope of entanglement to have it's own unique system, you just choose imobilized, grabbed or restrained, and end-of-next-turn, save ends, or escape to end it.  The kind of thing other games figured out 20 years ago, but still, moderately slick.Also, the structuring of PC powers gives a good guideline for keeping classes balanced.  It's not sure-fire, but it's helpful to give everyone about the same balance of unlimitted and limited-use resources.The announcements around Essentials are troubling for some related reasons.  (Well, and also because they sound so much like the ones around 3.5 -  it's not a new edition, your old books won't be useless, etc, etc).   The carefully structured class balance in 4e could be upset by the introduction of classes with different resource management issues.  Inevitably, power inflation will leave older material behind.  It's not just big changes like essentials.  For instance, when the PH first hit, STR-primary and even STR-secondary builds had a unique thing going for them, in that their OAs remained meaningful at all levels, because the MBA used STR.  Paladin, Cleric, Ranger, even Rogue, all had builds that made use of STR that were just a bit more desireable because of that.   Enter Melee Training and, coincidentally, the STR builds decline in desireability.That was just one feat.Essentials is a change in the whole direction of the game.  It's compatible, notice, in the sense that the new classes get all the goodies of the old classes, not in the sense of the old classes getting to use everything published for the new.  That's a virtual gaurantee of obsolescence as power inflation marches on and the old (/balanced/) classes get left behind.  Whether the new classes are published in essentials-style books or PHXs, the result is the same.  If Essentials really does just give us all the mechanics in a nice, fully-errated compendium, and provide a bunch of 'training wheels' classes, that'd be fine.  But, if it presages designers throwing the hard-won class balance of 4e out the window...</blockquote>

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