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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5146093" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my experience with many game systems, this rarely works out as well as you'd think.  The problem with point buy systems is that they usually require a significant amount of table agreement not to abuse them and the larger the scope of the options in question the more that this is true.  Point buy systems are almost impossible to balance.   Class based systems are much easier to roughly balance because there is a much smaller set of considerations.  When you are pricing a point buy system, you have to deal not only with every possible interaction but come up with some way to impose diminishing margin of returns on specialization to reflect the true value of being utterly awesome at one thing.  I just don't foresee alot of goodness coming out of point buy class or race systems in this context.  Sure, you could use standard table agreements not to abuse such a system, but in that case, its not really that different than just working out with your DM what he'll let you play.Really, what happened with late 3.5 edition strongly reminds me of the problems with point buy system.  As 3.5 (in my opinion unwisely) expanded the number of classes available, the multiclassing situation began to strongly resemble point buy character creation.  This was made worse by the fact that almost every class was front loaded to allow the character to play the full concept at low level (Pathfinder and FantasyCraft specifical try to fix this problem in different ways).  As the mutliclassing options and interactions increase, you reach a point by the mid to high levels that the character begins to resemble something created by a flawed point buy process with poor implementation of diminishing margin of returns on specialization.Almost as importantly, the D&D race model does not lend itself strongly to this because the standard D&D races are based on very small departures from human norms.  The race model does not work well for every large departures from human norm, and systems like LA are inherently broken and cannot be fixed because of D&D's open ended nature.   I think the very first problem you'd run into in such as system is that the standard racial builds are built off of such a small point value (racial advantages are small) that you'd not have enough points to build anything that departed from the norm.  (This is just another way of saying that you couldn't make every race +0 LA, even if you removed HD from calculation.)   There are some things you can do about this, and FantasyCraft demonstrates one approach to dealing with it, but in the end I think that the assumption of there being some easy build system to make manticores and humans and angels and mice balanced with each other and yet at the same time have a high degree of racial versimiltude in the mechanics is likely to end in frustration.</blockquote>

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