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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5152244" data-attributes="member: 4937">That is a good summary of my current thinking.The point buy system someone linked to earlier is a good example of why I don't think point buy works very well in general.  If you have a case where all the players are more interested in creating depth, variety, and flavorful characters and effectiveness is a secondary consideration, and where the DM is not interested in putting some constraints around what types exist in the campaign, then point buy can be an effective solution.  But the problem with point buy is that if you have players who have effectiveness as a primary consideration, and if you as a DM have particular ideas about what sort of abilities are common within your world, then a point buy system is going to cause difficulties.  The really great thing about the published point buy system in my opinion was how open it was about how unbalancing it would be without heavy handed DM management of what was and wasn't an acceptable build.  It didn't even pretend that it had created a balanced system.  It just listed a bunch of options and left it up to the table to manage how those options would be used.For my part, I'd like to be able to hand players a character creation document and say, "No character you make using these rules will be disapproved.  Whatever you make under these rules, I'll find a way to make it work in my game." and yet at the same time, not have the player feel that his options are really limited or introduce into my campaign characters that create degenerate games.  (Where I define the term 'degenerate games' to mean, "Games in which challenging the player's skill is made difficult by the character's ability to overpower any obstacle in his path that isn't specifically tailored to defeat him.")  My secondary goal is to make the system as terse as possible.  The reason for wanting to do that is twofold.  First, I want the character creation rules to be digestable, and secondly, I want the foreseeable interactions to be managable so that I don't miss something.  Therefore, the number of classes in the game should be IMO relatively small with little need to add more.  The goal is to provide so much flexiblity in the base classses and feat trees, that as a player that has seen it said, "You don't take a PrC, you become a PrC".UPDATE: I read that and realized it sounded like I was disparaging 'point buy' too much as a technique.  If you broaden what you mean by 'point buy', then class based systems can make really good use of point buy ideas.  The cleric is a good example.  The cleric gets to 'buy' two different starting abilities from a fairly large pool.   The fighter class is a class which expands its point pool over time and uses it to buy feats from a preselected pool.   The sorcerer is a class that does the same thing with spells.   You can generalize classes alot by taking this basic approach (which some has disparaged as 'every class is a list of bonus feats', but which works for me).</blockquote>

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