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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6178010" data-attributes="member: 17106">Impossible? No. Unlikely? Yes. Class systems make change and growth difficult. And, one might argue, it ought to be. Predetermination is a theme in fantasy fiction. Biological predetermination is a theme of real life. The game just follows our preexisting observations to the effect that people don't change much.None of those things sound like changes that would have particularly salient mechanical representations.Does that matter? A player who signs up to play a three foot tall fighter is almost certainly not doing so with the expectation that his overall combat effectiveness will be equivalent to that of a medium sized character. Why fix something that isn't broken?Exactly. The number of people who laugh at a bard trying to adventure alongside a barbarian is probably large. The number of people who acknowledge that some classes should be better or worse at adventuring than others is likely pretty much everyone. The number of people who will complain if a halfling dervish is whirling through combat just as effectively as a character twice his size is likely pretty much everyone.The number of people who have a meaningful in-game problem because of one macro-level mechanical choice being slightly better or worse than another? Miniscule. That's for the charop boards.I take a bevy of complaints every week about applying real laws of physics to the game, genre conventions and stereotypes built into mechanics, interpersonal and character-specific issues, and a variety of other things that have nothing to do with the balance of those mechanics. I've had probably a single-digit number of complaints, ever, about one character being more or less powerful than the others, most of which involved gross misreadings of rules and none of which were game-breaking. And, as you've pointed out, those complaints usually resolve themselves over time. I'm in favor of catering to the larger audience that cares more about stuff they understand and less about esoteric game mechanical considerations like whether the aggregate contribution of bards and barbarians is exactly equal.Um, it doesn't. That's kind of my point.In general, the more open-ended the mechanics, the faster they play. A DM who says "roll a Knowledge check" and sets a DC arbitrarily in his head resolves the check much faster than one who checks a series of rules to determine the DC. A character built using open-ended skills (like what 13th Age does with backgrounds) is built much more easily than one that requires researching and comparing all relevant skill options. PF's combat maneuver system plays a lot faster than magic (or its ilk) because you simply decide what you're trying, roll a die, and let the DM tell you what happens. Not as "balanced", but easier and faster.</blockquote>

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