D&D 3.x Favored Class

[Andvari]

It never came up back when I played, but I would have enforced it.

 

[Celebrim]

And, in fact, that's just part of the larger ecosystem of supporting options for new material that Paizo made fairly prevalent for PF1. You don't have to have any of them to make use of what's there, but not having them can be disappointing. For races, this includes:

• Favored class bonuses for various classes.
• Race traits.
• Race Point breakdowns.
• Alternative racial traits.

The problem I have with that much freedom is that it's never going to be used to make broader and more flavorful characters. It's going to be used to figure out what gives the most +'s.

There is also a certain bit of psychology going here where people just like +'s more than drawbacks, so the way you solve that is just give everything more +'s and adjust to the result power inflation by giving the monsters more +'s and bump up the difficulty classes by a tiny bit so that there is no net gain in how often you succeed. The numbers just get bigger, and you punish players more for not optimizing as hard, but you aren't achieving anything but gaming human psychology. I'm reminded of the WoW benefit to XP for the first X hours played, that started off as a penalty to XP after the first X hours played. Same thing, but fans loved the bonus and hated the penalty even though functionally they were identical.

 

[Alzrius]

The problem I have with that much freedom is that it's never going to be used to make broader and more flavorful characters.

That hasn't been my experience. Far from "never" I've seen a lot of players--in real life, rather than on the Internet--use those options to make characters that were, indeed, more flavorful.